Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks, explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogeneous network deployment based on micro, pico and femto-cells can be used to achieve this goal. Since cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a "green" cellular network technologyComment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Dynamic Geospatial Spectrum Modelling: Taxonomy, Options and Consequences

Much of the research in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) has focused on opportunistic access in the temporal domain. While this has been quite useful in establishing the technical feasibility of DSA systems, it has missed large sections of the overall DSA problem space. In this paper, we argue that the spatio-temporal operating context of specific environments matters to the selection of the appropriate technology for learning context information. We identify twelve potential operating environments and compare four context awareness approaches (on-board sensing, databases, sensor networks, and cooperative sharing) for these environments. Since our point of view is overall system cost and efficiency, this analysis has utility for those regulators whose objectives are reducing system costs and enhancing system efficiency. We conclude that regulators should pay attention to the operating environment of DSA systems when determining which approaches to context learning to encourage