A Parametric Power Model of upper Mid-Band (FR3) Base Stations for 6G

Increasing attention is given to the upper mid-band or Frequency Range 3 (FR3), from 7 to 24 GHz, in the research towards sixth-generation (6G) networks. Promises of offering large data rates at favorable propagation conditions are leading to novel FR3 base station (BS) architectures, with up to thousands of antenna elements and radio-frequency (RF) chains. This work investigates the power consumption of prospective FR3 BSs and its relation to the delivered data rates. We model the power consumed by digital and analog signal processing, PAs, and supply and cooling during four phases (data, signaling, micro-sleep, and idle) in downlink and uplink. Hybrid partially-connected beamforming is compared to fully-digital one. Results show that, for BS arrays with 1024 antennas at 30% of loads, the PA consumes most of the power when 64 or less RF chains are utilized, while the digital and analog processing consumption take over when the number of RF chains is 512 or more. The digital plus analog processing consumes 2× to 4× more than the PA for fully-digital beamforming. Hybrid beamforming achieves 1.3 Gbit/s/user in downlink while improving the energy efficiency by 1.4× compared to fully-digital beamforming.