A Survey of Green Mobile Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

The explosive development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has significantly enlarged both the energy demands and the CO2 emissions, and consequently contributes to make the energy crisis and global warming problems worse. However, as the main force of the ICT field, the mobile networks, are currently focusing on the capacity, variety and stability of the communication services, without paying too much severe concerns on the energy efficiency. The escalating energy costs and environmental concerns have already created an urgent need for more energy-efficient “green” wireless communications. In this paper, we survey and discuss various remarkable techniques toward green mobile networks to date, mainly targeting mobile cellular networks. We also summarize the current research projects related to green mobile networks, along with the taxonomy of energy-efficiency metrics. We finally discuss and elaborate future research opportunities and design challenges for green mobile networks.