The global footprint of mobile communications: The ecological and economic perspective

How much energy is needed to run a wireless network?

“…Obviously, this growth is accompanied by an increased energy consumption of mobile networks. Global warming and heightened concerns for the environment of the planet require a special focus on the energy efficiency of these systems [2]. The EARTH 1 project [3] is a concerted effort to achieve this goal and as part of its objectives, a holistic framework is developed to evaluate and compare the energy efficiency of several design approaches of wireless cellular communication networks.…”

“…Statistical analysis and projections presented in [2] suggest that global radio access networks might increase from 3.3 million BS sites in 2007 to more than 11.2 million BS sites in 2020 and the total power consumption is expected to grow from 49 TWh in 2007 to 98 TWh in 2020. During the same period the average traffic per site will increase from 62 kbit/s to somewhere between 11 to 18 Mbit/s.…”

La cara oculta de la sociedad de la información: el impacto medioambiental de la producción, el consumo y los residuos tecnológicos

“…De momento, el cómo evaluar ese impacto es un objeto de estudio en sí mismo (Malmodin et al, 2014;Kalaitzoglou, Bruntink, & Visser, 2014). Algunos trabajos apuestan por una visión más general del impacto del mundo digital (Chowdhury, 2013;Hankel, 2014); otros estudian aspectos y/o dispositivos de forma específica, sean las comunicaciones móviles en su conjunto (Fehske, Fettweis, Malmodin & Biczók, 2011), las redes inalámbricas (Auer et al, 2012;Zeller et al, 2013), los centros de datos (Cappiello, Melià, Pernici, Plebani & Vitali, 2014) y sus "servidores comatosos o zombies" 11 (Koomey & Taylor, 2017), o el paso del uso de ordenadores de sobremesa a tabletas (Hischier & Wäger, 2014). También son varios los autores que estudian si el paso del mundo offline al online es siempre positivo en tér-minos de sostenibilidad como se suele creer, obteniendo datos que cuestionan esta creencia generalizada (Arushanyan et al, 2014;De Decker, 2015).…”

A Bandit Approach to Price-Aware Energy Management in Cellular Networks

“…The rapid rise in energy consumption due to the future ultradense deployment of base stations (BSs) to support fastgrowing wireless traffic will increase the cost of electricity and may result in the revenue saturation of the network operator [1]. Thereby, powering the BSs with green energy generated from environmental sources has been regarded as a promising technology for the next generation cellular networks.…”