Wireless access strategies for carbon-neutral networks

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The broad and uninterrupted growth, during the last few decades, of the products and services of the information and communications technologies (ICT) industry as well as their omnipresence throughout all sectors of human activity, has lead to significant consequences with respect to the ICT industry's global carbon emission footprint. While this footprint is currently under 4% of global emissions, it is doubling every four years. On the other hand, the ICT industry offers a largely undevelopped capability to generate energy efficiency gains of 800 billion US dollars per year as well as to eliminate 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to all emissions of the USA or of China thus creating a huge economic opportunity in the 21st century, carbon-constrained economy. The research program will target the application to telecommunications networks, in the context of the availability of renewable energy resources, of cloud computing and virtualization principles in order to reduce the carbon footprint of these ICT infrastructures while at the same time improving their economic viability. Virtualization of wireless access will be the specific focus as it has received relatively little attention in the open literature compared to virtualization of network backbones and applications. It is notably proposed to apply cognitive radio principles to virtualization of radio access in order to adequately spectral resources and to maximize the use of such resources when they are available. Radio environment maps will also be examined in order to support cognitive functions in a virtualized radio access environment. This comprehensive research program is expected to contribute to groundbreaking outcomes for Canada's telecommunications future and to the training of highly qualified personnel with the technical competence and the vision to use such Green ICT principles as the basis for the 21st century, digital and carbon-constrained economy.