Green Radio - Investigating energy consumption of wireless networks
Background:
The energy consumption of wireless networks and of telecommunications is starting to be a major concern for service-operators. There are several reasons for this:
- The increased energy prices make this a non-neglectable part of the operating cost of the cellular systems
- he carbon dioxide emissions from the world telecommunications sector are Troughly the same as for air-traffic, around 2%, and are increasing at a rapid rate.
- If the energy consumption is low enough, the prospect to use alternative power generation in remote and low economy areas.
The above examples are only a few aspects worth exploring for more efficient and environmental friendly wireless communications. The research community has been very active in studying power consumption for battery powered applications such as sensor networks and mobile terminals, while the power consumption of the cellular infrastructure has been largely ignored. The manufacturers of mobile cellular systems, however, are working on reducing the power consumption of the base stations (BTS) in several ways:
- Improving the BTS efficiency by improving the efficiency of the power amplifier.
- Shut down selectively BTS during low traffic
- Different site solutions; this reduces the need for cooling or heating of equipment or in other ways optimizes the location of the BTS equipment,
- Using renewable energy, e.g. solar or wind energy, to power BTS.
An interesting extension of these ongoing efforts regarding todays system, is to investigate if future systems design and architectures, that are to provide broadband mobile/portable access, can be geared to provide a radically lower energy consumption. Whereas, the trade-offs between customer perceived quality and cost have been the focus of work at Wireless@KTH during the last 7-8 years, we now plan to take energy consumption into that equation.
Main objectives:
The main goal of the project is to investigate deployment strategies and resource management strategies for energy efficient wireless broadband access. The research activities are to study the system architecture and the relation between power consumption and bandwidth efficiency. Key objectives for the project are:
* Models for power consumption in access networks: What are the key elements of energy consumption in current and future networks and how can these be parameterized? These models can be used for short term and long term analysis:
o Short term: Are there improvements to be made with current technologies and network archictures ?
o Long term: How should future systems be designed (new architectures, modulation etc)
* Comparison of energy consumption and cost between different network architectures and deployment strategies;
* heterogeneous networks can be energy efficient when fulfilling high user demands for non-uniform spatial traffic distribution. The power efficiency of modulation methods is well studied, but may be revisited when we are considering the total system efficiency.
Expected outcome:
This project is pilot study for investigating energy consumptions in wireless networks. The main project outcome is to define the problem (in what cases are high energy consumption a problem?) and find which outstanding problems looks most promising for future research. We want to coordinate the project with the effort of the industry in the area. The research area is multidisciplinary and the project needs to cooperate closely with other research groups at KTH (and other research organisations) in for example environmental technology, electronics, signal processing and/or sensor networks. Short term output of the project is expected to be:
- Collaborating with the industry to make a review paper on the current state.
- Paper on energy-efficient network architectures.
- Forming of cross-disciplinary research projects (applications, establishment of projects, adding partners.
Participants:
Anders Västberg, Assistant Professor at KTH. (Project Leader)