Towards Green Connectivity: An AI-Driven Mesh Architecture for Sustainable and Scalable Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an AI-driven mesh network architecture that significantly improves energy efficiency, capacity, and sustainability of wireless networks, reducing costs and environmental impact in diverse deployment scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated AI-based mesh architecture with proximity deployment, spatial frequency reuse, and traffic prediction, enhancing sustainability and scalability of wireless networks.

Findings

Up to 84 times energy efficiency improvement.

Deployment costs reduced by nearly 74%.

Achieved 20 times capacity gain and 60% congestion reduction.

Abstract

Traditional macro-cell and micro-cell infrastructures suffer from severe inefficiencies, with current macro-cell networks operating at less than 5 percent energy efficiency, leading to nearly 95 percent of RF power wasted in covering vacant areas. The problem becomes particularly acute in high-density scenarios such as the Hajj, where approximately 7,000 temporary diesel-powered towers are deployed each year, consuming 56 million liters of fuel and emitting around 148,000 tons of CO2, yet still experiencing failure rates of nearly 40 percent at peak demand. To overcome these limitations, we propose an AI-driven mesh architecture based on three integrated enablers: (i) proximity-based deployment of low-power nodes within 250 to 300 meters of users, yielding a 38 dB link-budget gain and up to 6000 times efficiency improvement; (ii) spatial frequency reuse, which partitions cells into multiple non-interfering zones and achieves nearly 20 times capacity gain; and (iii) predictive network intelligence leveraging LSTMs to forecast traffic 5 seconds ahead, enabling smarter allocation and reducing congestion by about 60 percent. System-level evaluations combining propagation modeling and validated link-budget analysis demonstrate that this architecture delivers up to an 84 times improvement in useful energy delivery, reduces deployment costs by nearly 74 percent, and eliminates diesel dependence through solar-powered operations, thereby enabling sustainable, green connectivity for both rural and ultra-dense urban environments.