China Mobile, the country’s largest mobile operator, and equipment vendor ZTE agreed to cooperate to boost the energy efficiency of future 5G networks.

The operator and a number of industry partners have jointly conducted research on a new-generation low-power base station and more efficient devices. To enhance the energy efficiency of future networks, ZTE introduced its Access Cloud Engine (ACE) solution.

With a unified cloud architecture and shared infrastructure, ACE supports mobile edge computing and flexible deployment of services, ZTE said in a statement. It also supports multi-site collaboration and multi-system integration, and can enable and disable wireless resources according to service distribution and change features, which further reduced energy consumption.

Zhang Shizhuang, planning director of ZTE’s TDD product line, said the vendor is working with partners across a number of areas, including new base stations, chip evolution and application scenarios, to build more energy-efficient networks. The company proposed a variety of energy-saving solutions for enhancing the overall efficiency of Massive MIMO base stations.