A Survey of Green Mobile Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

The explosive development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has significantly enlarged both the energy demands and the CO2 emissions, and consequently contributes to make the energy crisis and global warming problems worse. However, as the main force of the ICT field, the mobile networks, are currently focusing on the capacity, variety and stability of the communication services, without paying too much severe concerns on the energy X. Wang · M. Chen · T. T. Kwon (B) School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] X. Wang e-mail: [email protected] M. Chen School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuan, China e-mail: [email protected] A. V. Vasilakos Department of Computer and Telecomm. Engineering, University of Western Macedonia, Macedonia, Greece e-mail: [email protected] Y. Liu TNLIST and School of Software, Tsinghua University, Tsinghua, China e-mail: [email protected] Y. Liu Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Hong Kong efficiency. The escalating energy costs and environmental concerns have already created an urgent need for more energy-efficient “green” wireless communications. In this paper, we survey and discuss various remarkable techniques toward green mobile networks, to mainly targeting mobile cellular networks. We also summarize the current research projects related to green mobile networks, along with the taxonomy of energy-efficiency metrics. We finally discuss and elaborate future research opportunities and design challenges for green mobile networks.