Toward Energy-Efficient 5G Wireless Communications Technologies [Tools for decoupling the scaling of networks from the growth of operating power]

The densification and expansion of wireless networks pose new challenges on energy efficiency. With a drastic increase of infrastructure nodes (e.g. ultradense deployment of small cells), the total energy consumption may easily exceed an acceptable level. While most studies focus on the energy radiated by the antennas, the bigger part of the total energy budget is actually consumed by the hardware (e.g., coolers and circuit energy consumption). The ability to shut down infrastructure nodes (or parts of it) or to adapt the transmission strategy according to the traffic will therefore become an important design aspect of energy-efficient wireless ?architectures. Network infrastructure should be ?regarded as a resource that can be occupied or released on demand, and the modeling and optimization of such systems are highly nontrivial problems. In particular, elements of the network infrastructure should be released by taking into account traffic forecasts to avoid losing the required coverage and capacity. However, even if traffic profiles were perfectly known, the determination of the elements to be released is complicated by the potential interference coupling between active elements and the sheer size of the optimization problems in dense networks. © 1991-2012 IEEE.