An approach to managing depowering activities in legacy telecommunications networks

Telecommunications networks represent a significant fraction of global energy consumption which has resulted in a drive to develop environmentally sustainable lower cost networks. As part of this migration, the efficient depowering of large volumes of legacy equipment located in geographically dispersed exchange buildings is of interest in terms of reducing energy usage and cost. This requires taking into consideration the baseloads of different types of network device, the various activity times required to depower various device types, and the total level of field resource that is available to carry out the tasks within a given time period. A knapsack problem method is used to compare and contrast strategies based on selecting either single devices or aggregates of devices as items for inclusion in the knapsack. The device-based approach enables earlier energy reduction compared to the aggregated approach at the expense of a larger number of site visits. A hybrid of these two approaches is shown to have additional benefit compared to only adopting one of them as part of a depowering programme.