Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 2Green Communication Concepts, Energy Metrics and Throughput Efficiency for Wireless Systems

Timothy O'Farrell¹ and Simon Fletcher²

¹University of Sheffield, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Sheffield, UK

²NEC Telecom MODUS Ltd, Surrey, UK

2.1 Introduction

In the last decade, the communications industry has overcome some extraordinary challenges transforming the way people communicate and access information. Interestingly, this revolution in communication, which touches every aspect of society from the economy, through health care to leisure, has been achieved by an evolutionary approach to enhancing the communications network infrastructure. Over the years, greater access to information has been motivated by the introduction of faster broadband connections (both wired and wireless), versatile and highly portable data centric devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), and new cloud-based services, which are globally appealing (e.g., social media and YouTube). Importantly, devices such as smartphones have introduced a platform concept that allows third parties to develop and distribute applications (Apps), which has sparked the rapid take-off of mobile broadband. As well as supporting core telecommunication services, network operators, including mobile network operators (MNOs), must provide reliable and inexpensive access to the Internet while the demand for data continues to grow rapidly. Against this backdrop, the industry is already turning its attention ...