Assessing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions of a Base Station

The increasing demand of mobile subscribers and data traffic, especially in 6G, requires the deployment of additional cellular base stations contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. In order to curb climate change, there is a pressing need to comprehensively assess these emissions and identify levers to reduce them. The currently widespread approaches for assessing environmental impacts rely on overall procurement and purchase flows, offering a generalized non precise perspective. This paper investigates the implementation of a physical methodology that relies on a component-specific breakdown of emissions associated with a cellular base station and needs the physical characteristics as well as full life cycle analyses of every equipment. The assessment of the greenhouse gas footprint of a radio access network site considers the three main phases of its life cycle. The build phase which mainly consists of manufacturing and deployment emissions, the run phase emissions resulting from energy consumption of active equipment and ongoing operation and maintenance activities, and the decommissioning phase emissions associated with the disposal of components at the end of their life.