Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
plant Icons applications Green ICT
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Areas in which Green ICT can reduce the energy consumption of information and communication technology.

Sustainable ICT-Systems

In 5G/6G and Green Communication Technologies

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Sustainable ICT

The word sustainability is on everyone's lips today: Achieving it will require a worldwide joint effort at all levels of society. In view of the deteriorating global environmental and climate conditions and the increasingly energy- and resource-intensive lifestyle of consumers in an increasingly digitalized and networked society, joint initiatives from industry, research institutes and standardization bodies are focusing their efforts on the topic of sustainability. They are working together on methods, KPIs, benchmarks and solutions for resource and energy efficiency for current and future generations of IoT and mobile communications.

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Whitepaper

This white paper deals with the current status of the main activities towards sustainability for current mobile communication networks with extension to future development. It covers the essential aspects of helping the digitized society become climate-neutral by 2050 at the latest. Moreover, relevant scientific activities of Fraunhofer IIS will complement this general overview of the work currently done or ongoing to qualify and quantify sustainability in the mobile communication context.

DOWNLOAD WHITE PAPER

Mobile Communication 5G/6G

 

Efficient Hardware

Energy-efficient hardware is a prerequisite for sustainable products. The IoT Systems research area combines many years of experience and expertise at Fraunhofer IIS. With our sustainable technologies, we can assist you with getting fit for the green ICT hardware.

Efficient IoT
 

Massive MIMO optimization

5G introduced massive MIMO based antenna unit, for 6G ultra-massive-MIMO-antennas are planned to respond to the higher transmission capacity and new frequency bands requirements. This means that the energy demand of a base station will exponentially grow with the number of antenna elements.

5G Test Platform
 

Beamforming

Beamforming uses multiple antennas to direct and transmit the same signal to individual receivers. Faster, more efficient and reliable wireless data transmission is the result. This is used especially for 5G and 6G.

6G SENTINEL
 

EDGE Computing

In the area of orchestration (of systems or of the network), a new strategy for distributing containers across different servers opens an opportunity to increase energy efficiency. Today, the focus of orchestration is on the accessibility of a server, considering the metrics of processor load and memory availability.

Edge Computing

Waveform Design

Regarding the power consumption modeling for 5G base stations, we can note the lack of accurate and tractable approaches and propose a model to better capture the benefits of energy saving techniques for future research standardization.

 

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Artificial Intelligence

AI is expected to be a key enabling technology for a great increase in flexibility and resource efficient usage of the network. But the application of AI itself goes not without resource consumption. A green design of AI functionality will not only bring AI benefits to the network, but will also ensure that AI implementations will not outweigh their resource saving benefits. Thus, it should be an integral part of all AI designs for the future 6G network.

TinyML

Network Energy Saving

In the Standardization 3GPP Release-18, a study item on Network Energy Saving was addressed to identify and evaluate potential techniques, which are summarized in a technical report TR 38.864. Following the study item, still in Release-18, a work-item phase is planned starting Q1 2023 where some of the solutions for Network Energy Saving shall be standardized. Furthermore, such a study item may lay the foundation for enhancements in further 5G NR releases and eventually also in 6G.

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UE Power Saving

Furthermore, battery lifetime is a significant dimension of Quality-of-Experience (QoE). Already in 3GPP release 15, 5G NR included features for UE power saving such as Discontinuous Reception (DRX) and the new Radio Resource Control (RRC) Inactive state. Today power saving enhancements include small data transmission in RRC Inactive, extended paging/DRX cycles, reference signals for quicker synchronization in Idle/Inactive and dynamic aperiodic skipping of control channel monitoring in RRC Connected.

GreenICT

ULP Wake-up Receiver

An important criterion for applications in the IoT sector is the lowest possible power consumption. Continuous wireless networking requires a lot of available battery capacity. The operating time of wireless sensor nodes is thus limited. The RFicient® portfolio enables low-maintenance ultra-low-power connectivity for many years.

 

LPWAN mioty®

Massive IoT applications in the smart city sector and IIoT require permanent energy for reliable and robust data transmission. Our energy-autonomous wide area network is a unique combination of the new LPWAN standard mioty® with energy harvesting.

mioty

Neuromorphic hardware

Current neural network architectures require high computational complexity and power consumption. Neuromorphic hardware, on the other hand, relies on massive parallel processing and performs calculations, e.g. for machine learning, faster and with less power.

 

Embedded KI

Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) is a research area in machine learning and describes the optimization as well as execution of AI-based processing chains on embedded systems.

tinyML

Self-sufficient energy supply

In the field of energy harvesting, we develop and investigate technologies and systems for harnessing energy from the environment to power small electronic consumers.

Edge Computing

The Edge Computing method enables energy-efficient virtualization of HW and SW components such as energy-efficient configuration and use of real-time operating systems.

Self-powered IoT sensors

We develop and offer technologies that generate electricity from slight temperature differences or barely perceptible vibrations in order to operate sensors or small devices in the IoT in an energy-autonomous manner - for example, monitoring screw connections.

Sensor-Edge-Cloud Hub

Fraunhofer IIS is establishing a competence center here for the main topic of sensor edge cloud. The aim is to bundle and validate the development of methods and models for environmental assessment, the creation of a measurement and simulation environment, and the implementation of sustainable hardware and software components using AI and edge computing methods. This Green-ICT S-E-C lab will serve as a focal point for industry, associations and politics.

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