Ieee Access Special Section Editorial: Special Section on Big Data for Green Communications and Computing

With the rapid growth of data in the past decades, information and communication technologies have made significant impacts on global environments on both positive and negative aspects. In recent years, international efforts have made advance green technology initiatives to support sustainable systems for technical, economic and societal developments
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,
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. Generation of huge amounts of data, called big data, across different sectors such as banking, healthcare, retail, and education, among others, is creating the needs for efficient tools to manage the data
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. Conventional database management tools do not have the capability to manage surging volumes of unstructured data. For example, more than 80% of data is unstructured in the form of videos, tweets, GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates and emails, which means that decisions need to be made at high velocity. The amount of data is expected to exponentially grow through data collections via pervasive sensors and/or the Internet, which also leads to new emerging challenges that have the potential to create more accurate solutions for science and technologies. We believe that big data have significant impacts on green communications and computing, which aims to provide energy-sustainable, resource-saving, and environment-friendly solutions. Recently, as a panoramic investigations on this direction, two relevant works have been recently published to provide some in-depth understandings in this area
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,
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. The goal of this Special Section is therefore to provide insights and views into the developments in the area of big data for green communications and computing, as well as to provide directions for research in the field.