Towards 6G: Leveraging Advanced Sleep Modes to Improve Energy Performance

To improve energy performance of the next generation of cellular networks and contribute to a more sustainable world, 6G Base Stations (BSs) should be designed to flexibly deliver the right performance at the right time, and with smallest possible energy consumption. We propose to leverage Advanced Sleep Modes (ASMs). One technique to achieve this is Cell DTX/DRX, which offers a configurable tradeoff between network performance and energy saving. Our system simulation results show that, in some cases, we can achieve substantial energy saving gains with limited impact on the user experience. Enabling ASMs can greatly reduce the static (load-independent) BS power consumption and thus, increase the proportionality between BS energy consumption and served traffic. We foresee that this work can play an important role towards more sustainable and power efficient cellular networks.