GROWAN 2012 - The 2nd international workshop of Green Radio-over-Fibre and all Optical Wireless Access Networks

1. Introduction
Telecom Bretagne is proud to announce the 2nd Edition of GROWAN, an international Symposium dedicated to future mobile and wireless access networks with minimised environmental impact. This event will take place in Brest (France) on June 20-21-22, 2012.
A selection of international key speakers from both industry and academia will be invited to address Radio-over-Fibre and All-Optical wireless technologies with a focus on minimising overall energy consumption in wireless access networks.
This unique event will provide great networking opportunities to set up prospective collaborative projects at an international level.
2. Motivation
The sheer convenience of wireless access ensures its popularity. One day, the first and last leg of every communications link will be wireless. These links will serve machines as well as humans, and must meet the ever increasing bandwidth demands of applications.
As a consequence, capacity use is growing faster than the energy efficiency of wireless networks, leading to unsustainable growth in total electrical energy consumption. Since the majority of electrical energy will be generated from the burning of fossil fuels for some time into the future, wireless networks could become a major contributor to global green house gas (GHG) emissions.
Strategies to increase capacity whilst reducing total energy consumption point towards high-density antenna distribution systems fed by a fibre optic network, i.e. the radio-over-fibre paradigm.
3. Scope and Objectives
Research in "Green" wireless is still at an early stage. Wireless-over-fibre and all-optical solutions can already be considered green in offering reduced energy consumption relative to alternative wireless access solutions.
It is therefore not necessary that contributors consider their current research agenda as specifically green, only that they feel that their research may have merit in terms of further reductions in energy consumption. GROWAN 2012 is intended to be a pathfinder event that draws together diverse ideas to identify promising new research directions and to create new collaborations in the field.
Since there is much detail to be worked out to optimise complete systems within a ‘green’ evaluation framework, GROWAN 2012 will focus on new methods, architectures and technologies for sustainable wireless-over-fibre and all-optical wireless access networks (please refer to the Call for Paper section for more information on topics to be addressed)