On System-Level Analysis & Design of Energy-Neutral Cellular Network

Description

Prof. Dr. Marco Di Renzo - In the last few years, research on energy-efficient wireless networks has received an upsurge of interest. With the emergence of new IoT-based application and service capabilities that 5G wireless networks need to be able to support, however, a question is worth being asked: “Is it sufficient that IoT-enhanced 5G wireless networks are energy-efficient?” The 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) says that this is not sufficient. Indeed, in their “5G manifesto” presented at the Mobile World Congress, 5G-PPP representatives have emphasized that “5G will bring drastic energy efficiency improvement and develop energy harvesting everywhere. This energy chase will cover terminal devices, network elements, and the network as a whole including data centers. For example, it will enable a 10 years lifetime of a battery powered sensor. It will also contribute to Europe’s objectives to improve our energy sources mix with more renewables installed, e.g., on base stations”. In a nutshell, in order to support the emerging IoT market, 5G wireless networks are required not to operate only in an energy-efficient manner but to be as much “energy-autonomous” as possible, by harvesting energy from renewable energy sources and radio frequency signals, which can be used for replenishing the batteries of low-energy devices and, for some IoT applications, even for allowing tiny low-energy mobile devices to operate without batteries. Even though this was considered to be pure science fiction up to just one year ago, recent technological advances have proved that this is indeed possible. In this talk, we will illustrate scenarios and applications that are currently under discussion in order to make 5G networks energy-neutral and, with the aid of tools from stochastic geometry, we will present a feasibility study about the application of RF-based energy harvesting to cellular networks.

Period	20 Jan 2017
Event type	Guest talk
Location	AustriaShow on map