Sustainable Wireless Broadband Access to the Future Internet - The EARTH Project

In a world of continuous growth of economies and global population eco-sustainability is of outmost relevance. Especially, mobile broadband networks are facing an exponential growing traffic volume and so the sustainability of these networks comes into focus. The recently completed European funded Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project EARTH has studied the impact of traffic growth on mobile broadband network energy consumption and carbon footprint, pioneering this field. This chapter summarizes the key insights of EARTH on questions like “How does the exploding traffic impact the sustainability?”, “How can energy efficiency be rated and predicted?”, “What are the key solutions to improve the energy efficiency and how to efficiently integrate such solutions?” The results are representing the foundation of the maturing scientific engineering discipline of Energy Efficient Wireless Access, targeting the standardisation in IETF and 3GPP, strongly influencing academic research trends, and will soon be reflected in products and deployments of the European telecommunications industry.