On the Carbon Footprint of D-Band Point-to-Point Radio Links for 6G

Environmental sustainability has become an important aspect in the development of communication networks and is prioritized in 6G. A key aspect is the carbon footprint. In this paper, we investigate D-band wireless links, which are presently in development for backhaul in 5G and 6G networks. We contribute quantitative data on energy consumption in the use phase, estimate the overall carbon footprint and study the effects of multi-channel architectures. Also, benchmarking to an equivalent 80 GHz link is provided.