Dieter Ferling

Sustainable Wireless Broadband Access to the Future Internet - The EARTH Project

In a world of continuous growth of economies and global population eco-sustainability is of outmost relevance. Especially, mobile broadband networks are facing an exponential growing traffic volume and so the sustainability of these networks comes into focus. The recently completed European funded Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project EARTH has studied the impact of traffic growth on mobile broadband network energy consumption and carbon footprint, pioneering this field. This chapter summarizes the key insights of EARTH on questions like ”How does the exploding traffic impact the sustainability?”, ”How can energy efficiency be rated and predicted?”, ”What are the key solutions to improve the energy efficiency and how to efficiently integrate such solutions?” The results are representing the foundation of the maturing scientific engineering discipline of Energy Efficient Wireless Access, targeting the standardisation in IETF and 3GPP, strongly influencing academic research trends, and will soon be reflected in products and deployments of the European telecommunications industry.

EARTH: Paving the Way for Future Energy Efficient Broadband Wireless Networks

Currently, the vast majority of mobile subscribers rely on second-generation mobile technologies, but service providers are investing into aggressive rollouts of mobile broadband networks to deliver a fully-featured wireless Internet. While the main focus in research has been put on enhancing the capacity of this kind of networks, very little has been done regarding their energy efficiency. On the other hand, rising energy cost and growing awareness of climate issues require a shift of focus. The EARTH (Energy Aware Radio and neTworking tecHnologies) project addresses this by investigating and proposing effective mechanisms to drastically reduce energy wastage and improve energy efficiency of mobile broadband communication systems, without compromising system capacity and users’ perceived quality of service. In this paper we sketch the main research approaches taken within the project. First, the methodologies to evaluate the energy efficiency of cellular networks, as well as the respective energy efficiency metrics are presented. Afterwards, the proposed solutions are described; within EARTH a holistic approach is being used so that advances in radio components, radio network technologies and advanced network management protocols are exploited jointly, resulting in combined gains that enable an expected power consumption reduction by 50%.