Green transmission technologies for balancing the energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency trade-off

As 4G wireless networks are vastly and rapidly deployed worldwide, 5G with its advanced vision of all connected world and zero distance communications is already at the corner. Along with the super quality of user experience brought by these new networks, the shockingly increasing energy consumption of wireless networks has become a worrying economic issue for operators and a big challenge for sustainable development. Green Transmission Technologies (GTT) is a project focusing on the energy-efficient design of physical-layer transmission technologies and MAC-layer radio resource management in wireless networks. In particular, fundamental tradeoffs between spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency have been identified and explored for energy-efficiency-oriented design and optimization. In this article, four selected GTT solutions are introduced, focusing on how they utilize the degrees of freedom in different resource domains, as well as how they balance the tradeoff between energy and spectrum efficiency. On top of the elaboration of separated solutions, the GTT toolbox is introduced as a systematic tool and unified simulation platform to integrate the proposed GTT solutions together.