14 DAY TRIAL // Alcatel-Lucent recently announced an enhancement for its GSM/EDGE mobile networking portfolio. According to the company, the new addition would be able to offer reductions in power consumption by up to 27 percent. The company demonstrated the energy consumption reductions in January during field trial with China Mobile in the country’s Jiangsu province. The trials allowed on average for a 24 percent power saving to be achieved.
The fresh feature is called Dynamic Power Save (DPS) and has been developed for Alcatel-Lucent’s GSM/EDGE base stations. According to the company, this enhancement, due to the fact that it is a software upgrade, could be installed on all Alcatel-Lucent multi-standard base stations that have been deployed since 1999, totaling a number of around 500,000 stations.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Dynamic Power Save capability relies on the switching off of the power amplifier in GSM transceivers. This way, it allows the base station to monitor the traffic activity on the network, while turning the amplifier off when there is no information to transmit, even if this happens for very short periods of time.
As the manufacturer indicates, this process would be able to provide substantial cost savings at night, when there is only a low volume of calls. At the same time, since it comes with rather sensitive monitoring techniques, it can also offer important power savings during day time. Moreover, call blocking will not be increased due to the savings, while the packet data throughput will not be affected either so that service quality remains leveraged.
“Alcatel-Lucent is committed to developing innovative technologies that help our customers reduce their carbon footprint while offering consistently reliable and top-quality services to their subscribers,” said Benoit de Corn, who leads Alcatel-Lucent’s GSM/EDGE activities. “No other wireless equipment vendor in the industry can boast such an impressive power consumption profile, particularly since we can apply these power savings to our entire embedded base of customers, going back to 1999.”