Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose ofproviding high throughput for the user and high capacity for the serviceprovider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, thesenetworks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe thesources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of thestudies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discusshow much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbonfootprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specificsources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physicallayer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. Inparticular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellularwireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks andpoint to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use basestation energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reducethis inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By aconsideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that animprovement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two ordersof magnitude, or even more, is possible.
展开▼
