Fundamental Tradeoffs on Green Wireless Networks

TLDR

Mobile wireless networks have traditionally prioritized ubiquitous access and high capacity, but growing energy‑saving and environmental concerns now drive a shift toward green radio design. This paper proposes a unified framework that consolidates the scattered fundamental issues of green radio research. The framework is built around four core tradeoffs—deployment‑efficiency vs. energy efficiency, spectrum‑efficiency vs.

Abstract

Traditional design of mobile wireless networks mainly focuses on ubiquitous access and large capacity. However, as energy saving and environmental protection become a global demand and inevitable trend, wireless researchers and engineers need to shift their focus to energy-efficiency oriented design, that is, green radio. In this paper, we propose a framework for green radio research and integrate the fundamental issues that are currently scattered. The skeleton of the framework consists of four fundamental tradeoffs: deployment efficiency - energy efficiency tradeoff, spectrum efficiency - energy efficiency tradeoff, bandwidth - power tradeoff, and delay - power tradeoff. With the help of the four fundamental tradeoffs, we demonstrate that key network performance/cost indicators are all stringed together.