Study on real energy consumption of large-scale campus wireless network

To satisfy the bandwidth requirement driven by the exponential increase of mobile Internet, the wireless network infrastructure has been deployed extensively in the past few years, which also bring great operational energy consumption at the same time. Both industry standard and academic research have given great effort on the energy saving technology. However, energy-saving studies on wireless infrastructure are quite few and lack of a deep sight of energy cost data. The energy consuming condition and characteristics of a wireless network are not clear till now. Combining series lab tests on devices and system operation log, this paper studies on the real energy consumption of Tsinghua University wireless network and then identifies the characteristics of whole energy consumption. The results show that there exists great energy saving margin for wireless infrastructure.