Quantifying Potential Energy Efficiency Gain in Green Cellular Wireless Networks

Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose of providing high throughput for the user and high capacity for the service provider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, these networks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe the sources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of the studies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discuss how much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbon footprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specific sources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physical layer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. In particular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellular wireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks and point to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use base station energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reduce this inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By a consideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that an improvement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two orders of magnitude, or even more, is possible.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1210.843

Optimal Training Design for Channel Estimation in Decode-and-Forward Relay Networks With Individual and Total Power Constraints

In this paper, we study the channel estimation and the optimal training design for relay networks that operate under the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy with the knowledge of the interference covariance. In addition to the total power constraint on all the relays, we introduce individual power constraint for each relay, which reflects the practical scenario where all relays are separated from one another. Considering the individual power constraint for the relay networks is the major difference from that in the traditional point-to-point communication systems where only a total power constraint exists for all colocated antennas. Two types of channel estimation are involved: maximum likelihood (ML) and minimum mean square error (MMSE). For ML channel estimation, the channels are assumed as deterministic and the optimal training results from an efficient multilevel waterfilling type solution that is derived from the majorization theory. For MMSE channel estimation, however, the second-order statistics of the channels are assumed known and the general optimization problem turns out to be nonconvex. We instead consider three special yet reasonable scenarios. The problem in the first scenario is convex and could be efficiently solved by state-of-the-art optimization tools. Closed-form waterfilling type solutions are found in the remaining two scenarios, of which the first one has an interesting physical interpretation as pouring water into caves