Energy and environmental aspects of mobile communication systems

The reduction of the energy consumptions of a Telecommunication Power System represents one of the critical factors of the telecommunication technologies, both to allow a sizeable saving of economic resources and to realize sustainable development actions. The consumption of about one hundred base stations for mobile phones were monitored for a total of over one thousand days, in order to study the energy consumption in relation to the environmental, electric and logistics parameters of the stations themselves. It was possible to survey, then, the role of the mobile communication systems in the general national energy framework and to plot the best areas of intervention for saving energy and improving the environmental impact, showing the role played by air-conditioning and transmission equipments. Finally, new transmission algorithms and the use of renewable energy based techniques have been tested. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.