Fundamental Trade-offs on Green Wireless Networks

Traditional mobile wireless network mainly design focuses on ubiquitous access and large capacity. However, as energy saving and environmental protection become global demands and inevitable trends, wireless researchers and engineers need to shift their focus to energy-efficiency-oriented design, that is, green radio. In this article, we propose a framework for green radio research and integrate the fundamental issues that are currently scattered. The skeleton of the framework consists of four fundamental trade-offs: deployment efficiency-energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency-energy efficiency, band-width-power, and delay-power. With the help of the four fundamental trade-offs, we demonstrate that key network performance/cost indicators are all strung together.