Reducing costs and pollution in cellular networks

Abstract

International audienceCellular wireless networks are expected to provide high-quality audio and video services while enabling fast and low-cost Internet access to mobile users. The need for green cost-efficient networks is twofold: reduce the service price and preserve the environment. In this work, we discuss the various strategies that help reduce infrastructure costs, power costs, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with no impairments on the quality of network services. These strategies range over a wide area from enhancing the electronics, to developing new energy-aware radio access protocols, to deploying enhanced base stations with tunable capacity. To reduce both capital and operational expenditures, and the GHG footprint, manufacturers propose new compact installation with lightweight antenna systems, very efficient power amplifiers, and efficient hardware and software. The resulting economy can be up to 50 percent or more by reducing the electricity bill, sparing the use of air conditioning, and deploying compact sites that would seldom require maintenance. Recent scientific publications confirm that a very high gain could be achieved by optimizing the use of base stations proactively, and huge additional improvements could be obtained by optimizing power saving mechanisms by leveraging traffic statistics

Life is Short: The Impact of Power States on Base Station Lifetime

“…radiated power (9) where AF off = γ off /γ ref tot is the acceleration factor in SM, which is always lower than one since we have assumed that the SM failure rate is lower compared to the reference one. Similarly, AF i = γ i /γ ref tot is the acceleration factor in power state i, which is again lower or equal than one since the failure rate at power state i is always lower or equal than the reference one.…”

“…The change in the power state may trigger a change on a temperature variation of some of the BS components. As an example, the authors of [9] report that the largest amount of power consumed by a BS is due to the power amplifier, which is involved when the SM state is activated/deactivated, and also when the radiated power is varied. Thus, power state changes triggering a temperature variation of BS components are affecting the everyday life of a BS.…”

Energy and area spectral efficiency trade-off for MC-CDMA with carrier frequency offset

“…A combination of hardware and software techniques are being researched and used to achieve this. As an example, the 2G GSM Base Station (BS) requires power of 800 W for its operation while the 3G BS requires 430 W [15]. This is important as the BS uses about 80% of the electricity consumed by a mobile network [13,14].…”

A Novel Power-Saving Transmission Scheme for Multiple-Component-Carrier Cellular Systems

“…At the same time, the power consumed by such wireless networks, especially by their BSs, has become a matter of increasing concern due to rising energy costs and the environmental impacts of the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions that accompany energy production. As a result, the concept of green communications has received increasing attention as a potential means of addressing these concerns [3][4][5][6][7]. The primary goal of green communications is reducing the overall amount of power consumed by the transmission of communications without causing any reduction in the service quality enjoyed by users.…”