A Survey on Energy Efficiency in Cellular Networks

With the continuous increase of user requirement, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has developed rapidly. As a result, both capacity and coverage performances have been improved, and at the same time, the communication networks have been more energy-intensive. In order to improve the energy efficiency of cellular networks, the green communication must be realized in the future networks. In this article, we present a short survey on energy-efficient technology of cellular networks. Moreover, we classify them into three categories based on theirapplication scenarios: energy-efficient architectures, energy-efficient resource management and energy-efficient radio technologies. For the first scenario, the applications of relay, Coordinated Multiple Points (CoMP) and heterogeneous network are discussed in detail. For the second scenario, the switching off scheme will be introduced as an emphasis of this part. And for the third scenario, the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) will be introduced as the representatives of the Energy-Efficient Radio Technologies. Finally, based on the technologies introduced above, a prospect forecast of the energy-efficient wireless cellular network is presented.