Survey of Green Radio Communications Networks: Techniques and Recent Advances

Abstract

Energy efficiency in cellular networks has received significant attention from both academia and industry because of the importance of reducing the operational expenditures and maintaining the profitability of cellular networks, in addition to making these networks "greener. " Because the base station is the primary energy consumer in the network, efforts have been made to study base station energy consumption and to find ways to improve energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a brief review of the techniques that have been used recently to improve energy efficiency, such as energy-efficient power amplifier techniques, time-domain techniques, cell switching, management of the physical layer through multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) management, heterogeneous network architectures based on Micro-Pico-Femtocells, cell zooming, and relay techniques. In addition, this paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each technique to contribute to a better understanding of each of the techniques and thereby offer clear insights to researchers about how to choose the best ways to reduce energy consumption in future green radio networks.

Base Station Energy Efficiency Improvement for Next Generation Mobile Networks

“…This means that to increase revenue, mobile operators need to optimize their expenditure. Scientists have estimated that ICT (including mobile cellular systems) contribute 3% [12] emissions. This 3% is equivalent to 25% of all car emissions in the world.…”

Energy Efficiency Tradeoff Mechanism Towards Wireless Green Communication: A Survey

“…In this survey, they have considered four main branches, as adaptive link rate, interface proxying, energy-aware infrastructure and energy-aware applications and observed the root causes of energy-waste in these four main branches. In [40], authors have presented an overview of the energy consumption problems of wireless communication networks and described different techniques in general that have been used to improve the energy efficiency of these networks. The work in [41] surveys and discusses various techniques towards realizing green mobile networks, with a focus on mobile cellular networks.…”

A Solar Energy Solution for Sustainable Third Generation Mobile Networks

“…The ideal scenario is to switch off BSs when the load of the data traffic is below a particular threshold for a certain time period [8]. When several BSs are deactivated, the devices that remain actively handle the radio coverage and service provisioning [9]. The issue of BS switching can be treated as an optimization problem that reduces the number of active BSs, while addressing the access network's data traffic load.…”