Green Network Costs of 5G and Beyond, Expectations Vs Reality

• Main Authors: Yousif Al-Dunainawi, Raad S. Alhumaima, H. S. Al-Raweshidy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2018-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Green communications; networks; models; modeling; cost; efficiency
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8491260/

Generally, it has been taken for granted that green technology provides clean and cheap energy, but often without consideration of the costs. In fact, there are many tradeoffs concurrent with enabling such technology. Accordingly, this paper evaluates and compares the green energy-oriented mobile networks with their traditional counterparts. It presents a mathematical model that helps in understanding different variables which are necessary to advocate the green/renewable method over the traditional form or vice versa. This research shows that the cost efficiency of green networks can be relatively high, about twice that of the traditional, which is represented by a cloud radio access network. Based on the experimental data, this research shows that green technology requires more operational control than the traditional form to produce the same amount of power. With variant sites, cities, countries, geographical areas, and equipment manufacturing characteristics, the proposed model can predict the futuristic total green network's tradeoffs. By doing so, the service providers, investors, or network vendors will be able to decide upon an appropriate balance between both types of networks.