Cognitive Resource Scheduling Designs Towards Green Wireless Systems

It is reported that the total energy consumed by the ICT infrastructure of wireless and wired networks takes up over 3 percent of the worldwide electric energy consumption that generated 2 percent of the worldwide CO2 emissions nowadays. It is predicted that in the future a major portion of expanding traffic volumes will be in wireless side. Furthermore, future wireless network systems (e.g., 4G/B4G) are increasingly demanded as broadband and high-speed tailored to support reliable Quality of Service (QoS) for numerous multimedia applications. With explosive growth of high-rate multimedia applications (e.g. HDTV and 3DTV), more and more energy will be consumed in wireless networks to meet the QoS requirements. Specifically, it is predicted that footprint of mobile wireless communications could almost triple from 2007 to 2020 corresponding to more than one-third of the present annual emissions of the whole UK. Therefore, energy-efficient green wireless communications are paid increasing attention given the limited energy resources and environment-friendly transmission requirements globally.

The aim of this project is to improve the joint spectrum and energy efficiency of future wireless network systems using cognitive radio technology along with innovative game-theoretic resource scheduling methods, efficient cross-layer designs and contemporary clinical findings. We plan to consider the health and environmental concerns to introduce power-efficient resource scheduling designs that intelligently exploit the available wireless resources in next-generation systems. Our efforts will leverage applications of cognitive radio techniques to situational awareness of the communications system with adaptive power control and dynamic spectrum allocation. This project will underpin the UK green communication technology by designing environment-friendly joint power and spectrum efficient wireless communication systems.

The main potential beneficiaries of this research project will be as follows:

1. Academic benefits: see details in the above Academic Beneficiaries section.

2. Wireless and mobile industry: including manufacturers, operators, SMEs etc. The manufacturers and SMEs will benefit from the joint spectrum and energy efficient algorithms and techniques for future green wireless communications created by this project. The network operators can also benefit from the developed optimisation techniques to exploit operational-level savings of energy and spectrum costs of their mobile wireless networks.

3. Policy makers and regulators: e.g. UK OFCOM, ITU-R. It is anticipated that the outcomes of this work will help the policy makers and radio regulators to better understand the regulatory requirements of future cognitive and green wireless markets as well as the guidance on how to minimise the potential interference from cognitive radio users to primary users.

4. Professional and standard bodies: Our potential standard proposals will help to create new wireless standards or improve the existing standards in the future green and cognitive radio based wireless communication systems.

5. General public: General public will be offered an opportunity to express their concerns on energy consumptions, frequent charging and potential radio radiation impact on their health issues caused by wireless/mobile communications to relevant manufacturers and operators via the project workshop events and website discussion forums. On the other hand, more people will be made aware of how importantly the development of future energy efficient wireless communication systems can significantly reduce energy consumptions and offer them an environment-friendly smarter and safer green communication world in the future.