Common predictions show that by 2015 the traffic traversing the access segment (both wireless and wired) will be 25-30 times larger than today. Extrapolating this trend to 2020 would yield a thousand-fold increase in traffic. Meeting this demand, with today's wireless and fixed broadband access network solutions, would lead to an unacceptable increase in the network power consumption. For this reason, energy efficiency in the broadband access segment has attracted a lot of attention and a wide range of topics are the target of extensive research works.
On the wireless side, while power efficient transmission and protocol design for mobile nodes remain to be active research areas in green wireless networks, there are also exciting new design elements that need to be taken into account. For example, wireless networks can now take advantage of rechargeable nodes that can harvest/scavenge energy. Such networks with stochastic energy resources can run perpetually when designed properly, providing flexibility, maintenance-free networking and the ultimate green wireless solution. This new paradigm calls for revisiting the design of transmission policies, signal processing techniques, information theoretic limits, and networking protocols in order to manage the available energy at the transmitting and receiving nodes. In addition, there is now an increasing emphasis on overall energy optimization of wireless communication networks including that of the wireless access points and the base stations. As such, deployment of femtocell and picocell networks with the aid of multiple antennas can help in reducing the carbon footprint that the cellular data demands currently create. Here again various research challenges arise to be considered along with practically relevant deployment challenges providing green wireless solutions.
On the wired side, Passive Optical Networks (PONs), long reach PONs and point-to-point fiber access solutions are becoming an energy efficient and attractive alternative to their active counterparts. But there is also another essential aspect to consider: optimizing the energy consumption in each access portion separately (i.e., focusing only on green wired and/or wireless strategies) may lead to non-optimal solutions. In fact with the evolution towards more dense or heterogeneous networks there are also indications that the backhaul contribution to power consumption will grow, potentially nullifying the benefits of some energy efficient wireless access strategies. To properly address this aspect there is a need for a holistic understanding of the energy optimization of the mobile access segment as a whole, where the backhaul contribution has to be included in the power optimization strategies of the wireless access part.
The goal of this workshop is to bring in expert researchers both in academia and industry in the forefront of energy efficient broadband access, i.e., in the newly emerging areas of energy efficient cellular design, rechargeable energy harvesting wireless networks, energy efficient Passive Optical Network solutions, and green backhaul strategies specifically tailored for converged wired-wireless scenarios.