Fundamental Tradeoffs on Green Wireless Networks

Traditional design of mobile wireless networks mainly focuses on ubiquitous access and large capacity. However, as energy saving and environmental protection become a global demand and inevitable trend, wireless researchers and engineers need to shift their focus to energy-efficiency oriented design, that is, green radio. In this paper, we propose a framework for green radio research and integrate the fundamental issues that are currently scattered. The skeleton of the framework consists of four fundamental tradeoffs: deployment efficiency - energy efficiency tradeoff, spectrum efficiency - energy efficiency tradeoff, bandwidth - power tradeoff, and delay - power tradeoff. With the help of the four fundamental tradeoffs, we demonstrate that key network performance/cost indicators are all stringed together.