Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 12Energy Saving Standardisation in Mobile and Wireless Communication Systems

G. Punz, D. C. Mur and Konstantinos Samdanis

NEC Europe Ltd, Heidelberg, Germany

12.1 Introduction

As should have become apparent from the previous chapters, energy saving (ES) has to be considered as a system-wide optimization effort, and for distributed systems like wireless/mobile networks, where many components of potentially different vendors have to cooperate, functioning together in an interoperable way, standardization is essential. In this section, we focus mainly on ES-related efforts of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEEs) standardization bodies. 3GPP is a worldwide organization defining the most important and successful standard for mobile communication. The brand names of UMTS (also known as “the” 3G technology) and its “Long Term Evolution” (LTE, nowadays taken synonymously for 4G) are well known. They also maintain the specifications of predecessor technologies GSM and GPRS. Besides 3GPP, other complementary organizations among the most noticeable ones, the Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) Alliance and GSM Association (GSMA) aim to deliver the mobile operator perspective to other standardization bodies and into the telecommunications industry. Specifically, NGMN Alliance is an operator-driven forum concentrating on mobile broadband technologies and particularly on LTE and its evolution. GSMA is a mobile ...