Abstract-In this paper, we review the literature on physical layer energy-efficient communications. The most relevant and recent works are mainly centered around two frameworks: the pragmatic and the information theoretical approaches. Both of them aim at finding the best transmit and/or receive policies which maximize the number of bits that can be reliably conveyed over the channel per unit of energy consumed. Taking into account both approaches, the analysis starts with the single user SISO (single-input single-output) channel, and is then extended to the MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) and multi-user scenarios.
I. INTRODUCTIONDuring the past decade, energy consumption has become an increasingly important issue in wireless networks. For instance, in the current cellular networks, the mobile terminals are equipped with relatively large screens, required to offer more and more functionalities and they need to operate at higher transmission rates for a longer period of time. At the fixed infrastructure level of these networks, the number of base stations has increased dramatically implying important energy costs. According to [2], these costs are expected to be multiplied by a factor of six within the decade 2002-2012. However, significant progress has been made in the art of designing wireless transmitters and receivers. This includes antennas and electronic circuits technology, signal processing algorithms, channel coding techniques and network protocols. The arising question is: Will technological progress be fast enough to control and decrease the energy consumption at the terminal and the network infrastructure sides? Answering such a question is a difficult task and only partial answers can be provided. For this purpose, different communication and information theoretical tools will be used. An important tool and one of the technological breakthroughs in communications is the MIMO concept (i.e., systems composed of multiple antenna terminals) [3][4] [5]. It is well known that, for a pointto-point communication, using multiple antenna terminals in full diversity mode (i.e., all the transmmit antennas are used to send the same information over the channel) allows one to decrease the transmit power while ensuring a fixed quality of transmission (e.g., the bit error rate).In this paper, we overview the literature on energy-efficient communications w.r.t. the number of bits that can be reliably conveyed over the channel per unit of energy consumed. The research on this topic has been focused on two main approaches: a pragmatic approach based on practical modulations, coding-decoding schemes, electronics and an informa-