icc 2011 - The Fourth IEEE ICC 2011 Workshop on Green Communications

The steadily rising energy cost and the need to reduce the global CO2 emission to protect our environment are today’s economical and ecological drivers for the emerging consideration of energy consumption in all fields of communications. Triggered by network operators experiencing energy cost as a significant new factor of their calculation, researchers have started to investigate approaches for reducing power consumption and manufacturers have started offering energy-efficient network components. Also standards bodies, such as the IEEE, are already developing standards for energy-efficient protocols. While research and development in these areas has recently gained momentum, the space of potential solutions is still far from being explored.
The Fourth International Workshop on Green Communications will be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Communications ICC2011 (IEEE ICC 2011) and will bring together academic and industrial researchers for discussing energy-efficient communications. After three previous successful workshops on green communications at ICC'09, GLOBECOM'09, and GLOBECOM'10, it will continue to serve as a forum for addressing research challenges between the already established conferences and workshops covering energy efficiency for IT on one side and for wireless sensor networks on the other side.
We see particular potential for reducing energy consumption in mobile and wireless access networks, broadband access networks, and home networks:
Broadband to the home is bringing to the fore the additional issue of power consumption in the home to access and use BB services and equipment. The European Commission is estimating that by 2012 the energy consumption in the home for BB fruition will reach 50 TWh, from basically 0 TWh in the year 2000. Of the 10% (electricity consumption) globally spent for ICT, already today 70% are spent in homes / offices and only 30% in the network / server farms. That means that energy consumed by the homes will be twice as large as the one consumed by networks to bring broadband into the homes. The operators may contribute to stem the increase of power consumption in the home by an intelligent control of residential energy from the network.
Data rates in wired and wireless networks are driven by "Moore's Law" and are thus rising by a factor of roughly 10 every 5 years. The price paid for this enormous growth is a doubling of the power consumption in cellular networks infrastructure (base stations and core network) every 4-5 years - to 60 TWh (billion kWh) in 2007. The radio access network accounts for 80% of this energy consumption. In developing countries, operators now spent more than half of their OPEX only for the diesel required to keep base station generators up and running. Increasing the energy efficiency of base stations has thus become a key challenge of mobile networks operators.