Towards Green Wireless Networks: Energy-Aware Techniques for Emerging Applications with Evolving Network Architectures

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The past decade has witnessed an explosive growth of tremendous mobile traffic, pervasive smart devices, and assorted new applications. While this growth leads to increasing revenue for the global mobile industry, there are rising concerns on environmental impact and high capital/operating expenditure. Driven by the pressing needs from both economical and ecological perspectives, energy efficiency and greening becomes one of the dominant themes for 5G wireless networks. Although such demands have attracted considerable attentions and efforts from the academia and industry, the evolving network architectures need to be continuously augmented with green networking algorithms to fully harvest the potentials. Meanwhile, new user-driven applications keep emerging and call for efficient solutions to maintain sustainable growth. This research program will contribute to the evolution towards next-generation green wireless networks through exploring energy-aware techniques that leverage evolving network architectures, smarter mobile devices, and diverse characteristics of a plethora of emerging applications. Particularly, we will focus on three thrusts. First, exploiting the intelligence of smart devices, we will develop new algorithms for cooperation cluster grouping, task assignment, and incentive for user participation. Energy-efficient multipath transport protocols with user cooperation will also be studied by balancing throughput performance and energy consumption. Second, taking advantage of multi-tier radio access networks, we will develop traffic-aware sleep schemes for different types of base stations, and service-differentiated scheduling schemes for small cells powered by renewable energy sources. Third, leveraging the evolving mobile core with in-network caching, we will develop smart routing algorithms that can reduce energy consumption by shifting traffic while ensuring user quality-of-experience (QoE). This research is expected to benefit Canadian industry by providing guidelines and references for wireless service providers to expand their service capacity while saving capital/operating expenditures. There will also be significant benefits to Canadian society through energy conservation for environment protection. Highly-qualified personnel will be trained in this program and will contribute to the progress of green wireless networks.