Increasing Cellular Network Energy Efficiency for Railway Corridors
Adrian Schumacher1,2,a, Ruben Merz1 and Andreas Burg2
1Swisscom (Switzerland) Ltd., 3050 Bern, Switzerland
aadrian.schumacher@swisscom.com
2Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Telecommunications Circuits Laboratory, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
ABSTRACT
Modern trains act as Faraday cages making it challenging to provide high cellular data capacities to passengers. A solution is the deployment of linear cells along railway tracks, forming a cellular corridor. To provide a sufficiently high data capacity, many cell sites need to be installed at regular distances. However, such cellular corridors with high power sites in short distance intervals are not sustainable due to the infrastructure power consumption. To render railway connectivity more sustainable, we propose to deploy fewer high-power radio units with intermediate low-power support repeater nodes. We show that these repeaters consume only 5% of the energy of a regular cell site and help to maintain the same data capacity in the trains. In a further step, we introduce a sleep mode for the repeater nodes that enables autonomous solar powering and even eases installation because no cables to the relays are needed.
Keywords: 5G, Energy-Efficiency, Mmwave, DAS, Repeater.
