Green Communication Technologies and Solutions

During the past few years, there is a huge increase in connected devices and with the advent of 5G, this will surge. Number of mobile users alone is expected to reach the mark of 5.01 billion by 2019. Higher data rates and fast speed internet will be a basic requirement for these connected devices. A large amount of transmit power would be required to support all these devices resulting in a huge amount of energy consumption. This would result in the emission of greenhouse gases. It is evident that a large amount of carbon dioxide would be produced by these connected devices, which will increase, by millions of tons of fold in future. The energy efficient devices and the control of power consumption in cellular networks are one of the key features of green communication. Resource allocation is one of the techniques to control the power consumption and to make the network energy efficient. Hence, there is an urgent need for the green communication that is a discipline of greater interest with the on-going evolution in the information and communication technologies. The researchers and industries are doing their best to find the most feasible solutions and techniques for the green communication. A lot of work has already been done in this field. This paper presents a review on some techniques employed in the field of 5G communications namely Device-to-Device communication (D2D), massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output), Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) and Green Internet of Things (IoT) and some challenges are discussed.