This book outlines the design of green energy driven, integrated smart grid and wireless networks. It also explores the integration of renewable energy with the traditional power grid. The core idea is to enable each grid user to be a potential energy source for the grid, thereby revising the conventional idea of power grids. A grid networked system of such distributed ambient powered nodes can potentially act as a carbon-free energy producer system to the power grid in addition to an energy prosumer system. The need for this book stems from increased power consumption in contemporary communication systems, the inflexibility of the traditional power grid, and the non-scalability of standalone green communication systems
Chapter 1 outlines the upcoming research theme of 6G communications and highlights the importance of sustainability. From a beginner's perspective, Chapter 3 presents insights on the design constraints and challenges in system analysis. It details the inherent cost metrics and network operations associated with ambient powered tele-networks. Chapter 2 acts as a benchmark, wherein a detailed design and performance evaluation in purely off-grid solar powered base stations is presented. The chapter includes insights on the outage prone-ness of ambient powered nodes and presents a Markovian framework to estimate the outages through first principles. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 present an in-depth analysis of grid networked and ambient powered telecommunication networks, presenting optimal amounts of energy which the nodes can share among each other or trade with the grid. Chapter 4 first presents a cooperative energy balancing based framework among the networked nodes. Through energy balancing, the improvement in network green energy utilization is shown, thereby realizing carbon free green networks. Chapter 5 analyzes the ambient powered and networked system from an operator perspective. By incorporating revenue awareness, it illustrates the beneficial effects of energy balancing and its complementarity to load balancing, aiding the scalability of green solutions from an industry perspective. From a system perspective, a joint load-energy balancing is studied, showing insights on the operator revenue being influenced by user service and network green energy utilization.
Chapter 6 showcases an aerial-terrestrial green network design, wherein the inherent coupling between the data and energy networks of the system are studied. As a case study, system performance is evaluated for a aerial base station (BS) aided terrestrial network. Chapter 7 demonstrates a wider perspective of the energy balancing in networks, through a residential setting. It is worthwhile to note that the concept of energy balancing can be easily extended to energy aware network design, including ambient internet of things (IoT), wireless sensor networks, or green data center networks. Chapter 8 presents a glimpse of green artificial intelligence (AI) aided future networks. The key research directions wireless communication networks are showcased, wherein AI can be used to improve upon the current state of art. The chapter also gives a detailed discussion on upcoming green AI models, the tradeoff between energy efficiency and AI performance, and the need to develop computationally light and efficient AI models for future networks.
This book targets advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering focused on this topic. Professionals scaling green service provisioning solutions to large networks will also find this book useful as a reference.
About the Author :
Li-Chun Wang (Fellow, IEEE) received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1996. He is currently the Dean of the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Lifetime Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan. Prior to joining academia, he served as a Senior Researcher at AT&T Labs-Research. Prof. Wang was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2011 for his contributions to cellular architecture design and wireless resource management.
His research interests include data-driven intelligent wireless communications, 6G networks, and sustainable networking technologies. He has published over 300 journal and conference papers, holds 50 domestic and international patents, and has received numerous national and international research awards.
Swades De (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Tech. degree in Radiophysics and Electronics from the University of Calcutta in 1993, the M.Tech. degree in Optoelectronics and Optical communication from IIT Delhi in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2004. Dr. De is currently a Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi. His research interests are broadly in communication networks, with emphasis on performance modeling and analysis. Current directions include resource allocation, energy harvesting, wireless energy transfer, energy sustainable and green communications, spectrum sharing, smart grid networks, and IoT communications.
Dr. De currently serves as an Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, and Associate Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, and IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE.
Ashutosh Balakrishnan (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering jointly from IIT Delhi, India and NYCU Taiwan, in 2024; and the B.Tech. (Hons.) degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from NIT Raipur, India, in 2019. He is currently a Maître de Conférences, at the Department of Computer Science and Networks, Télécom Paris, France. Additionally, he is an associate member of LINCS, France, and a visiting researcher at INRIA Paris. His research interests broadly pertain to analytical modeling based system design and performance evaluation of stochastic networks. Current research directions include non-terrestial networks, joint communication & sensing, distributed energy systems, and sustainable network designing for upcoming 6G communications. Dr. Balakrishnan currently serves as an Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS.
