SYNERGY: Turkcell’s automated smart energy management solution

Who: Turkcell and TTG

What: Developed and implemented SYNERGY smart energy management platform to automate the management of Turkcell’s energy infrastructure and reduce OpEx

How: Implemented TM Forum’s ZOOM concepts to develop a platform that automatically collects and analyzes field data, enabling operations to identify and focus on pain points

Results:

• 20% reduction in battery investment cost
• 5% increase in battery lifetime
• 5% decrease in energy-related availability losses
• 7% reduction in generator fuel consumption
• 0.5% decrease in electricity consumption
• ROI achieved in less than one year

Like many telecoms operators around the world, Turkcell is continuously investing in its fixed and mobile network infrastructure to enhance broadband services and evolve to next-generation technologies like 5G.

However, a significant chunk of that investment is the energy infrastructure necessary to power it all. Turkcell estimates that installing the energy infrastructure accounts for nearly 30% of its total network infrastructure investment costs – and that cost is likely to increase as 5G rollouts continue.

That’s a cost that generates no direct revenue for the company. Thus, Turkcell needed a solution to bring its energy OpEx costs down – specifically, it needed a smart energy management solution to bring automation to its energy infrastructure and operate it on a zero-touch basis – and all without compromising service quality.

In 2020, Turkcell partnered with TTG to develop a solution called SYNERGY. The SYNERGY platform is designed to accomplish three key objectives: enable Turkcell to avoid over-dimensioning by provisioning the right power requirements to each site; future-proof its operations against the additional power requirements of 5G; and reduce battery investment costs via analysis of the battery’s age and backup durations.

Fragmented infrastructure

When it comes to energy management, you need to know about existing infrastructure capacity to carry out precise resource dimensioning when rolling out new capacity or new technologies. The primary challenge that SYNERGY had to address is the fragmented nature of the average telco energy infrastructure.

While network equipment is usually either from a single vendor or a handful of vendors whose equipment can interoperate with each other, a typical energy infrastructure comprises different power infrastructure systems (including DC power supplies, batteries, cooling systems, diesel generators, smart meters and other components) from multiple vendors, explains Mehmet Beyaz, CTO of TTG International.

Indeed, it takes a high number of field teams – and a lot of valuable time – to protect the infrastructure (for example, activities such as local parameter changes and battery tests) and achieve high network availability.

Turkcell and TTG realized that transforming this environment into an optimized, zero-touch infrastructure would mean redesigning network operations so that data could be collected from the field and ported to a single platform in a way that provided insight to the entire energy infrastructure. This would enable operations to focus on pain points and to be organized efficiently to achieve availability targets. At the same time, automation algorithms would be necessary to optimize power consumption and thus lower OpEx costs. All of that required a smart energy management tool to manage it.

Building SYNERGY

The starting point, says Beyaz, was to test and analyze the communication protocols, messages and registers on the interfaces for each field device type.

“After setting up a lab environment to analyze each type of device, the engineering team identified 475 data points, and created a database structure to meet historical data requirements,” Beyaz says. “Meanwhile, a backend team developed remote connection and data fetching algorithms. Also, a user-friendly web interface was designed to present device monitoring, administration, alarms, reports and user management by front-end developers.”

Once two-way communication is established, the system queries device-specific data points every five minutes and stores the collected information (such as temperature, load current, voltage, alarms, status, etc.) in the database for various purposes.

Autonomous remote management enables actions such as: The system provides an alarm monitoring screen that aggregates information from the data points to present insights and decision-support items such as:

• Battery management parameter updates so that distributed power systems run with standard settings and eliminate user mistakes for sites with different load levels and battery types
• Remote battery tests that can be scheduled and started for thousands of sites simultaneously
• Hybrid operation control and seasonal auto parameter updates for cooling devices to reduce power consumption
• Diesel generator start-up algorithm to reduce fuel consumption by considering site temperature and environmental conditions.
• Battery test results to identify battery aging and site backup capacity
• AC phase failure reports to identify sites with poor grid quality
• Monitoring diesel generators to calculate diesel usage during site outages, check fuel levels, etc.
• Site temperature history to optimize cooling capacity
• Cooling operation logs to calculate power usage efficiency for each site.

Exploring the TM Forum Catalysts

In developing SYNERGY, Turkcell and TTG took inspiration from recent TM Forum Catalyst projects. In fact, TTG was part of a Catalyst project called “Wirtschaftswunder leveraging 5G for Industry 4.0” at the Digital Transformation Asia event in 2019. That catalyst was focused on network service design for Industry 4.0 leveraging 5G network slices over PNF and VNF using industry standards like OASIS TOSCA, IETF YANG, TM Forum Information Framework (SID), and TM Forum Open APIs. The project included a demo of closed-loop automation using real-time network monitoring and provision of additional 5G network slices via dynamic orchestration – all integrated seamlessly and with zero-touch.

“We had a chance to visit and learn from the Catalyst booths about zero-touch automation during our visits to Digital Transformation World events in Nice in 2018 and in Kuala Lumpur in 2019,” Beyaz of TTG adds. “The discussion on collaboration communities also helped provide a better understanding of the Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) concept at TM Forum, especially on the topics of developing SLA management, end-to-end user experience, inventory management and OSS transformation. Our approach is to sense failures, identify and assess them and get into the action automatically where we help engineering teams focusing on outlier issues.”

ROI achieved in less than a year

According to Turkcell, the implementation of the SYNERGY platform has already generated savings in a number of areas. For example, its battery investment cost is now 20% lower, thanks to SYNERGY’s ability to analyze data from installed batteries and energy consumption.

That data allowed the operator to model the optimum number of batteries needed for each site, reduce the number of batteries on site, and replace faulty batteries in battery groups immediately to protect other batteries in the group. This has also increased battery life by 5% by ensuring uniform parameters for battery operation are set at all times.

SYNERGY has also produced a 5% decrease in energy-related availability losses by not only predicting how much time each site has before fuel runs out or the battery dies, but determining which sites get higher priority in an outage situation.

When there are multiple outages, operator have to decide which sites to send field teams to first, a prioritization is needed to the sites that carry more traffic or have an important position in the topology. SYNERGY enables the operator teams to evaluate the criticality of the energy outages to help field technicians decide where to go first.

The SYNERGY platform has also reduced Turkcell’s fuel consumption 7% by integrating operation of batteries and generators so that the operator can automatically adjust generators to kick in based on remaining battery capacities. The platform also allows Turkcell to continuously monitor rectifiers to keep them in the optimum efficiency zone, which removes excess power system capacity and reduces electricity consumption by 0.5%.

While single-digit savings may not look impressive on paper, the real payoff is evident in the ROI, says Beyaz. “Once you factor in the savings and reduction in availability losses, Turkcell managed to achieve a return on investment for SYNERGY in less than a year.”