POTENTIAL GAINS
In the development of radio link protocols, the focus has been on low power consumption of mobile terminals. Ignoring the power consumption of base stations in the design of the radio transmission techniques inevitably leads to energy wastage. Current research on energy efficiency aspects of cellular radio access technologies focuses on isolated hardware aspects, hence, an embracing analysis is lacking. In order to achieve the largest energy savings, a joint optimization of spectral and power efficiency for the radio link operation is necessary. Future research must instead take the total energy consumption as optimization criterion into account, in both the radio interface and network nodes, and in different operation and deployment situations, which is expected to yield significant energy savings. The resulting new radio interface and transmission techniques will exhibit a much higher flexibility for the dynamic adaptation of the radio transmission to the dynamic traffic load situations and operation environment.