Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Energy efficiency has become a key issue in the last few years due to the rising energy costs and serious environmental impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. It has been revealed that the mobile communication networks alone consume approximately 60 billion kWh per year. The energy consumption will directly translate into CO2 emission, global warming, greenhouse gas emission, and interference pollution all with a huge impact on the environment. Furthermore, the energy consumption is also a concern from an economic perspective as expenses for electricity tend to increase. Energy costs account for as much as half of a mobile operator's operational expenses. Both the responsibility of environmental protection and the incentive to lower the operational expenses have motivated network operators to find solutions to reduce energy consumption of their networks, and that objective stimulates innovative research. However, most of the research efforts in addressing the energy saving issue are from the individual device or end user's perspective, and the works that deal with the entire network are somewhat preliminary with simple traffic/network models and do not rigorously analyze the effect of interventions on quality-of-service (QoS). The current networks are typically designed and deployed to accommodate peak traffic load, and the power consumption on their elements is unnecessarily high under low traffic load. This shows great potential for improvement of energy efficiency from network perspective. This research will tackle the energy efficiency issue of mobile communication networks from network perspective. The objectives are to develop novel network management technologies to dynamically adjust the power consumption of network facilitates, adaptive to traffic load variations over time, and propose new network planning and deployment strategies, taking not only spectral efficiency and coverage, but also energy efficiency into account. We will also investigate the impact of the proposed energy efficiency mechanisms on QoS perceived by users, and study the tradeoff between the energy efficiency and QoS. The technologies developed from this research will enable mobile communication networks with unprecedented energy efficiency and significant reduction in environment pollution, therefore making considerable contribution to developing a “green” Canada. The substantial reduction of network energy consumption will also yield large cost savings for mobile network operators. The cutting-edge research will generate new ideas and techniques, which are expected to spawn new revenue sources for the Canada telecommunication industry and also great social payback. This research program will produce HQP training for graduate and undergraduate students who will become scientists/engineers for critical Canadian industrial sectors related to information and communications technologies as well as contribute talent to academia.