The importance of energy efficiency has grown alongside awareness of climate change due to the rapid increase of greenhouse gases. With the increasing trend regarding mobile subscribers, it is necessary to prevent an expansion of energy consumption via mobile networks.

In this thesis, the energy optimization of the new radio access technology called 5G NR utilizing different sleep states to put base stations to sleep when they are not transmitting data is discussed. Energy savings and file latency with heterogeneous and super dense urban scenarios was evaluated through simulations with different network deployments.

An updated power model has been proposed and the sensitivity of the new power model was analyzed by adjusting wake-up time and sleep factors. This showed that careful implementation is necessary when adjusting these parameter settings, although in most cases it did not change the end results by much.

Since 5G NR has more potential in energy optimization compared to the previous generation mobile network 4G LTE, up to 4 sleep states was implemented on the NR base stations and one idle mode on LTE base stations. To mitigate unnecessary sleep, deactivation timers are used which decides when to put base stations to sleep. Without deactivation timers, the delay could increase significantly, while with deactivation timers the delay increase would only be a few percent.

Up to 42.5% energy could be saved with LTE-NR non-standalone deployment and 72.7% energy with NR standalone deployment compared to LTE standalone deployment, while minimally impacting the delay on file by 1%.