Since the United Nations General Assembly in December 1987, and its Resolution 42/187, sustainable development has become an issue and an aspiration of our civilization. Communities world-wide continuously make efforts in promoting ecology to address future issues of global warming. Currently, 2% of the world-wide energy is consumed by the ICT industry which discharges more than 830 million tons of CO2 every year. Mobile radio communication sector used to be considered as responsible of 9% of that figure. However, recent industry reports estimate that while the overall carbon footprint of all ICT technology will almost double between 2007 and 2020, the footprint of mobile communications might almost triple within the same period resulting in 235 million tons of CO2 –equivalent per year in 2020. This is mainly due to the estimated exponential increase of the multimedia traffic in future radio networks. Therefore the challenges for 5G radio communication to be operational in 2020 are set to achieve 10 times the energy efficiency, data rate, and spectral efficiency compared with today’s 4G systems, although for a single link, an increase of the spectral efficiency may be contradictory to the increase of energy efficiency.
This keynote talk will addresses the trends in mobile data traffic and related power consumption as well as the opportunities to increase energy efficiency of future radio communication networks, systems and devices. We will consider relevant and realistic power-consumption models that include increased processing complexity and radio-environment awareness in the network, both envisioned for enhanced performance in the networks of the future. The competitive green technologies to expand network capacity, possible tradeoffs and solutions to increase energy-efficiency for high data-rates in 5G (and beyond) radio will be discussed. Finally, we will attempt to assess the economic, social and environmental impact of potential energy savings of these green radio technologies.
