Abstract
The rising energy costs and carbon footprint of operating cellular networks have led to a trend in addressing energy-efficiency amongst the network operators and regulatory bodies such as 3GPP and ITU. "Greening" the wireless networks is a vast research discipline that needs to cover all the layers of the protocol stack and various system architectures and it is important to identify the fundamental trade-offs linked with energy efficiency and the overall performance. In this talk, we identify four important aspects of a green networking where we would like to focus: defining green metrics, bringing architectural changes in base stations, network planning, and efficient system design. We begin with a brief discussion on energy efficiency metrics. Since Base Stations (BSs) consume a major chunk of input energy, we discuss the energy efficiency of BSs. Next we discuss energy efficiency from a network planning perspective, based on smaller cells for heterogeneous networks. For system design, we put a special emphasis on cognitive and cooperative techniques in order to realize energy efficient cellular systems. Finally we discuss some broader perspectives and possible future trends in realizing a green cellular network technology.