Collective Grid: Privacy-Preserved Multi-Operator Energy Sharing Optimization via Federated Energy Prediction

Abstract

Electricity consumption in mobile networks is increasing with the continued 5G expansion, rising data traffic, and more complex infrastructures. However, energy management is often handled independently by each mobile network operator (MNO), leading to limited coordination and missed opportunities for collective efficiency gains. To address this gap, we propose a privacy-preserving framework for automated energy infrastructure sharing among co-located MNOs. Our framework consists of three modules: (i) a federated learning-based privacy-preserving site energy consumption forecasting module, (ii) an orchestration module in which a mixed-integer linear program is solved to schedule energy purchases from the grid, utilization of renewable sources, and shared battery charging or discharging, based on real-time prices, forecasts, and battery state, and (iii) an energy source selection module which handles the selection of cost-effective power sources and storage actions based on predicted demand across MNOs for the next control window. Using data from operational networks, our experiments confirm that the proposed solution substantially reduces operational costs and outperforms non-sharing baselines, with gains that increase as network density rises in 5G-and-beyond deployments.