Energy and spectrum opportunistic relaying for sustainable wireless networks

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Wireless services play an increasingly important role in our society transforming people's lives, industry processes, and society interactions. Although they help to reduce CO2 emissions, for example with telecommuting and increase in production efficiency, they also cause an increase in service demand and economic growth, leading to an overall increase in CO2 emissions. With an objective to reach net-zero emissions in several countries, including Canada, by 2050, it is important to reduce the emissions of future mobile networks, which already account for 2% of global energy consumption. In this context, this research program aims to provide new understanding and guidelines on the design of low emissions and sustainable wireless networks. Particularly, the general objective of this research program is to design, model and analyze wireless networks incorporating relays powered by renewable energy sources with an objective of decreasing the wireless network emissions and improving their sustainability while meeting the quality-of-service requirements of various applications. Specific techniques that will be investigated to achieve these goals include directional antenna relays and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces to reduce the required energy for transmission, and opportunistic relay selection exploiting available renewable energy, spectrum, and channel conditions in different locations. The first outcome of this research project will be novel radio resource management algorithms and medium access control protocols to collect channel and energy statistics, select the optimal relays and configure their parameters (beamforming vectors, spectrum access, etc.), and optimally transmit the information to minimize the network emissions. Both optimal solutions providing theoretical bounds and real-time heuristic algorithms leading to practical implementations and standardization in beyond 5G networks will be proposed. The second outcome of this research project will be network planning methods for the optimal spectrum allocation, deployment and configuration of base stations and relay nodes powered by renewable energy sources to maximize the network sustainability. The third outcome of this research project will be theoretical, analytical, and computer simulation tools to evaluate the network emissions and sustainability of wireless networks integrating relay nodes powered by renewable energy sources. It is therefore expected that the proposed research project will yield significant research contributions to the important area of green wireless networks with a novel understanding on the use and impact of relays with various characteristics and capabilities. Those results will be of interest to wireless service providers, equipment manufacturers, policy-makers, standardization organizations and the research community. As such, it should contribute to the successful deployment of low emission and sustainable wireless networks in the future.