A Novel Energy Efficiency Metric for Next Generation Wireless Communication Networks

Abstract

As a core performance metric for green communications, the conventional energy efficiency definition has successfully resolved many issues in the energy efficient wireless network design. In the past several generations of wireless communication networks, the traditional energy efficiency measure plays an important role to guide many energy saving techniques for slow varying traffic profiles. However, for the next generation wireless networks, the traditional energy efficiency fails to capture the traffic and capacity variations of wireless networks in temporal or spatial domains, which is shown to be quite popular, especially with ultra-scale multiple antennas and space-air-ground integrated network. In this paper, we present a novel energy efficiency metric named integrated relative energy efficiency (IREE), which is able to jointly measure the traffic profiles and the network capacities from the energy efficiency perspective. On top of that, the IREE based green trade-offs have been investigated and compared with the conventional energy efficient design. Moreover, we apply the IREE based green trade-offs to evaluate several candidate technologies for 6G networks, including reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and space-air-ground integrated network. Through some analytical and numerical results, we show that the proposed IREE metric is able to capture the wireless traffic and capacity mismatch property, which is significantly different from the conventional energy efficiency metric. Since the IREE oriented design or deployment strategy is able to consider the network capacity improvement and the wireless traffic matching simultaneously, it can be regarded as a useful guidance for future energy efficient network design.