To go or not to go green: An economic analysis

Green, i.e., energy-efficient, communications technologies have been a trend for next-generation cellular communications systems. An imperative question for network operators to address is whether and to what extent one should move to embrace such newly proposed green communications technologies. On one hand, the introduction of green communications technologies saves the operating cost, and on the other hand, it may also lead to some extent of degradation of the quality of service, which would drive users away towards other operators. In this paper, a preliminary economic analysis is developed to address such a tension. An operator chooses to upgrade a proportion of its infrastructure from the legacy technology to some green communications technology, and the goal of analysis is to figure out how large the proportion should be, depending upon system parameters including quality of service, price, and initial user distribution. The analysis reveals that a variety of possibilities exist.