Reducing power consumption has been a priority in the telecommunications industry for years with efforts focused on both devices and base stations. The 3GPP, for instance, has been tackling this issue from the perspective of switching times, or shutting down parts of a network when not in use. While this works great, there is still a lot of wasted energy, and Qualcomm is proposing a complementary approach of optimizing power consumption even when the network is actively transmitting by improving the efficiency of a network’s power amplifier (PA), and in some cases, the spectral efficiency.
