绿色通信:如何“笑”到最后

Green Communications:How to “SMILE”(Send More Information Bits with Less Energy)

绿色通信的研究应从能量的"节流"和"开源"2个方向同时展开,其中节流最有效的手段来自网络覆盖层,即通过引入超蜂窝的网络架构实现控制覆盖与业务覆盖的解耦,使得业务基站有更多的休眠机会,从而大幅度提高网络的能量效率。开源的最有效手段是大量引入可再生能源,通过高效地利用可再生的能量降低电网的能耗,从而提高网络整体的能量效率。无论采用哪种手段,其核心技术挑战将是如何实现信息流与能量流的智能匹配,这既是未来绿色通信能够"笑"(SMILE:Send More Information bits with Less Energy)到最后的关键,也催生出了一个全新的交叉学科领域,即能量信息学。

The researches on green communications can be divided into two majorapproaches： one is by saving energy and the other is by exploiting renewable energy.For the energy-saving approaches, the most effective way comes from the networkcoverage layer by decoupling the traffic serving coverage from the control signalingcoverage so that the traffic base stations have more opportunities to sleep （andtherefore bring a great amount of energy savings） with the coverage guarantee bycontrol base stations. This is so-called hyper-cellular architecture. For therenewable-energy exploiting approaches, the key is to adaptively match theinformation flows to the energy flows and vice versa, which is extremely hardbecause both the information flows and energy flows are highly dynamic. These arenot only the core parts of the SMILE （Send More Information bits with Less Energy）for green communications, but also open up a new research fields called energyinformatics.