Survey of Green Radio Communications Networks: Techniques and Recent Advances

Abstract

Energy efficiency in cellular networks has received significant attention from both academia and industry because of the importance of reducing the operational expenditures and maintaining the profitability of cellular networks, in addition to making these networks “greener.” Because the base station is the primary energy consumer in the network, efforts have been made to study base station energy consumption and to find ways to improve energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a brief review of the techniques that have been used recently to improve energy efficiency, such as energy-efficient power amplifier techniques, time-domain techniques, cell switching, management of the physical layer through multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) management, heterogeneous network architectures based on Micro-Pico-Femtocells, cell zooming, and relay techniques. In addition, this paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each technique to contribute to a better understanding of each of the techniques and thereby offer clear insights to researchers about how to choose the best ways to reduce energy consumption in future green radio networks.