Nokia, KDDI test energy-efficient 6G base station technology 

With 6G networks said to be less than four years away from commercial roll-out, KDDI Research – the R&D arm of leading Japanese operator KDDI – has announced that it has worked with Nokia to develop technology to optimise how a base station manages network resources, improving the efficiency of data transmission and reducing energy consumption in 5G/6G infrastructure and realising sustainable 6G.

The technology is being labelled as Intelligent 4D Resource Optimisation Technology, and Nokia and KDDI’s joint research agreement will explore additional ways to reduce network energy use, and the findings will be shared with the industry as 6G standards in 3GPP continue to develop.

KDDI Research and Nokia Bell Labs, Nokia’s industrial research lab, concluded a joint research agreement on 6G in November 2025 and have been working together on the development of new technologies for the practical implementation of 6G. One of the themes of this joint research is the development of technologies that can simultaneously improve the communication quality of 6G base stations and reduce their power consumption.

The partners said that their work to date has seen the successful conclusion of a proof-of-concept trial, described as the world’s first initiative to combine four-dimensional resources to simultaneously achieve high-quality communications and reduced base station power consumption on commercial equipment. 

Explaining the rationale for their work, the companies said that with the expansion of video streaming, cloud services and the internet of things (IoT), communications traffic has been increasing year by year.

They added that in the 6G era, the widespread use of new services such as AI is expected to generate data volumes far exceeding those of today. To realise mobile networks in the 6G era, it will be necessary to scale up and densify base station equipment to enhance communication performance, which will in turn increase the number of base stations.

As a result, they said that there is growing concern about the overall power consumption of networks, particularly that of base stations. In addition, the KDDI Group has set a goal of achieving both improved communication quality and carbon neutrality. Rather than simply pursuing higher speed and larger capacity for 6G, the KDDI Group said that it was looking to establish network technologies that can simultaneously deliver high quality and low power consumption.

The trial was conducted over the course of a month in March and April 2026 at Nokia Bell Labs in the US at an environment emulating commercial 5G deployment. It is said to have shown fundamental attributes such as up to 40% lower power consumption at the same throughput levels – up to four times throughput without increasing power consumption compared to existing 5G base station equipment

Looking in depth at the technology tested, the firms said conventional base station control has optimised the four key radio resources – time, frequency, space and transmission power – individually or only in a limited, partially coordinated manner. Control of these resources affects throughput.

To simultaneously achieve reduced base station power consumption and maintain high communication quality, the partners said that it is necessary to balance the control of these four resources and minimise the impact on throughput.

The technology under development is intended to enable optimal, integrated control of all four resources in accordance with the radio environment and throughput requirements.

Specifically, the technology is seen as making it possible to implement control schemes that were not feasible with conventional methods, such as actively using more time and frequency resources while suppressing transmission power and reducing the number of active antennas.

The firms said that they would build on this technology – expected to serve as a fundamental technology for reducing the environmental impact of mobile networks – and apply it to research even more energy-efficient 6G network technologies by coordinating multiple base stations and frequency bands.

Assessing what has been achieved to date, Harish Viswanathan, head of the radio systems research lab at Nokia Bell Labs, said: “Novel energy efficiency mechanisms will become increasingly important for mobile networks as generative, agentic and physical AI traffic with different levels of burstiness become a significant portion of traffic.

“This lab trial demonstrated that significant energy savings are achievable through a combination of antenna muting and power control coupled with traffic load dependent intelligent time and frequency resource allocation, paving the way for scalable, energy efficient mobile networks in the future.”