Quantifying Potential Energy Efficiency Gain in Green Cellular Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the sources of energy inefficiency in cellular wireless networks, quantifies their impact on carbon footprint, and explores methods to significantly improve energy efficiency, potentially reducing consumption by over 100 times.

Contribution

It identifies key inefficiencies in cellular networks and quantifies the potential for substantial energy savings through various improvements.

Findings

Cellular networks' carbon footprint is substantial and increasing.

Multiple strategies can collectively reduce energy consumption by over two orders of magnitude.

Base stations are the primary source of energy inefficiency.

Abstract

Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose of providing high throughput for the user and high capacity for the service provider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, these networks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe the sources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of the studies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discuss how much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbon footprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specific sources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physical layer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. In particular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellular wireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks and point to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use base station energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reduce this inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By a consideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that an improvement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two orders of magnitude, or even more, is possible.