Energy-Efficient Indoor Networks

With the growing popularity of high-performance computing devices such as tablets and smart-phones, and the growing trends of cloud-based services, forecasts indicate that the majority of Internet traffic will originate from inside of the buildings. Thus indoor network infrastructure needs to provide both better capacity and better coverage. Meanwhile, energy efficiency of the network becomes an additional requirements on the network design, due to the rising concern of the carbon footprint of telecommunication industry over the past few years. In this paper, we discuss a few fundamental trade-offs that need to be considered when designing energy-efficient networks. We also discuss the energy efficiency of Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) links and compare RoF-based architectures with legacy Baseband-over-Fiber (BoF) for two scenarios: growing network capacity and improving network coverage. We demonstrate that the understanding and the analysis of main energy hogs and their trade-offs in various network architectures is a key factor in optimizing the design of energy-efficient network architecture.