Power Reduction in FM Networks by Mixed-Integer Programming: A Case Study

The climate change emergency calls for a reduction in energy consumption in all human activities and production processes. The radio broadcasting industry is no exception. However, reducing energy requirements by uniformly cutting the radiated power at every transmitter can potentially impair the quality of service. A careful evaluation and optimization study are in order. In this paper, by analyzing the Italian frequency modulation analog broadcasting service, we show that it is indeed possible to significantly reduce the energy consumption of the broadcasters without sacrificing the quality of the service, rather, even getting improvements.