The United Nation’s ICT body the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have agreed a standard to measure the energy efficiency of radio access networks (RANs). The ITU said this is the first such standard and claimed it will unify energy efficiency evaluations of live RANs and the interpretation of results of such assessments.

The standard, called the ‘energy efficiency measurement and metrics for telecommunication network’ (aka ITU-T L.1330), was developed by the ITU-T Study Group 5 and ETSI Technical Committee on Environmental Engineering, in liaison with the 3GPP and the GSMA.

“ETSI has a track record of developing market-driven standards and specifications to deliver improved energy efficiency in telecommunications networks and equipment,” Luis Jorge Romero, ETSI Director General said. “We are particularly pleased by the result of this cooperation which has produced ITU-T L.1330 and the technically equivalent ETSI ES 203 228.”

According to the ITU, the standard takes into account the fact network’s overall energy efficiency optimisation cannot be guaranteed by the optimisation of just some equipment within it. The organisation claimed the standard takes a wider view of RAN and the impact of interactions between interconnected equipment in complex networks, and said it will be used to estimate overall energy efficiency of entire networks.

“Improving the energy efficiency of ICT has become central to all fields of technical standardisation at ITU,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “We are moving towards a world that will host billions of connected devices, things and objects, making energy efficiency essential to the functionality and environmental sustainability of ICT networks.”

The standard covers radio base stations, backhauling systems, radio controllers and other radio-site infrastructure equipment, as well as the GSM, UMTS and LTE/LTE-Advanced technologies. ITU said it will enable a ‘total’ network to be defined by topologic, geographic or demographic boundaries. Ultimately it will be used to make estimates of the energy efficiency of an operator’s network or the networks of a country or region, and the results will be collected into an assessment report.