There has been a significant increase on the level of concern regarding climate
warming and environmental sustainability issues; and the industry are under
increasing pressure from customers, shareholders and proposed legislative changes to
improve their environmental credentials. Likewise, the environmental impact of
Information and Communications Technologies (CIT) under the banner of “Green ICT” has started being discussed by academia, media, industry and government. Currently, 3 %-4% of the world-wide energy is consumed by the ICT infrastructure (approximately, 1.5%-2% by wireless), which causes about 2 % of the world-wide CO2 emissions (which is comparable to the world-wide CO2 emissions by airplanes or one quarter of the world-wide CO2 emissions by cars). If this energy consumption is doubled every five years, serious problems may arise. Therefore, lowering energy consumption of wireless radio systems is demanding greater attention.
The industry already takes this issue seriously, and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions committed to the rapid development of global, market-driven standards for the information, entertainment and communications industry, has just published three standards used to determine telecommunication equipment’s energy efficiency. The standards introduce the Telecommunications Energy Efficiency Ratio, or “TEER,” as a measure of network-element efficiency. The standards provide a comprehensive methodology for measuring and reporting energy consumption, and uniformly quantify a network component’s ratio of “work performed” to energy consumed.
This report analyzes the specifics of green wireless Information and Communications Technologies. These technologies make possible many enhancements in the industry and in our everyday life; examples include:
- Intelligent Transportation Systems - ITS
- Office and Industrial Automation
- Wireless Sensor Networks - WSN.
Due to their proliferation and applications extensions, it is very important to keep wireless ICT green, i.e., to utilize technologies that allow low power consumption; as well as to use power harvesting. Three wireless technologies are analyzed from this prospective:
- Ultra Wideband - UWB
- ZigBee, and
- Bluetooth.
The report addresses applications, marketing and technological specifics of these standards. All three technologies are known by their very low power consumption; ZigBee very soon will be equipped by a “green” profile, making harvesting of power available. Bluetooth SIG provided Ultra Low Power profile; and UWB is in the winning position when a large bandwidth is required by users - this technology is the most attractive from green perspectives in large bandwidth applications. The report also researches a power harvesting industry and shows that power harvesting has already attracted many manufacturers - the report is analyzing portfolios of these manufacturers and discusses various harvesting methods.
The report shows that wireless ICT deployment must follow a simple rule: a balance between “green” dollars and introduction of additional pollutants (by ICT manufacturing, powering and so on) must be always considered. So far, as it has been shown by the industry, utilization of wireless ICT can significantly reduce maintenance and staffing expenses (which are the largest burden on service providers). Also, some applications (such as ITS) made wireless ICT an important and necessary part of their functioning.
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