Fundamental Green Tradeoffs: Progresses, Challenges, and Impacts on 5G Networks

TL;DR

This paper reviews fundamental green tradeoffs in wireless networks, focusing on 4G and 5G technologies, highlighting research progress, challenges, and their implications for energy-efficient network design.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of green tradeoffs in 4G and 5G, categorizing research efforts and discussing future challenges and impacts.

Findings

Progress in OFDM and NOA techniques for energy efficiency

Advances in MIMO and HetNets for green communications

Identification of key challenges in sustainable wireless network design

Abstract

With years of tremendous traffic and energy consumption growth, green radio has been valued not only for theoretical research interests but also for the operational expenditure reduction and the sustainable development of wireless communications. Fundamental green tradeoffs, served as an important framework for analysis, include four basic relationships: spectrum efficiency (SE) versus energy efficiency (EE), deployment efficiency (DE) versus energy efficiency (EE), delay (DL) versus power (PW), and bandwidth (BW) versus power (PW). In this paper, we first provide a comprehensive overview on the extensive on-going research efforts and categorize them based on the fundamental green tradeoffs. We will then focus on research progresses of 4G and 5G communications, such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and non-orthogonal aggregation (NOA), multiple input multiple output (MIMO), and heterogeneous networks (HetNets). We will also discuss potential challenges and impacts of fundamental green tradeoffs, to shed some light on the energy efficient research and design for future wireless networks.