A Novel Energy Efficiency Metric for Next-Generation Green Wireless Communication Network Design

As a core performance metric for green communications, the conventional energy efficiency (EE) definition has successfully resolved many issues in the energy-efficient wireless network design. In the past several generations of wireless communication networks, the traditional EE measure plays an important role to guide many energy-saving techniques for slow varying traffic profiles. However, for the next-generation wireless networks, the traditional EE fails to capture the traffic and capacity variations of wireless networks in temporal or spatial domains, which is shown to be quite popular, especially with ultrascale multiple antennas and space–air–ground integrated network (SAGIN). In this article, we present a novel EE metric named integrated relative EE (IREE), which is able to jointly measure the traffic profiles and the network capacities from the EE perspective. On top of that, the IREE-based green tradeoffs have been investigated and compared with the conventional energy-efficient design. Moreover, we apply the IREE-based green tradeoffs to evaluate several candidate technologies for 6G networks, including reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and SAGIN. Through some analytical and numerical results, we show that the proposed IREE metric is able to capture the wireless traffic and capacity mismatch property, which is significantly different from the conventional EE metric. Since the IREE-oriented design or deployment strategy is able to consider the network capacity improvement and the wireless traffic matching simultaneously, it can be regarded as a useful guidance for future energy-efficient network design.