Greening is not merely a trendy concept, but is becoming a necessity to bolster social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Naturally, green communications has received much attention recently. As cellular network infrastructures and mobile devices proliferate, an increasing number of users rely on cellular networks in their daily lives. As a result, the energy consumption of cellular networks keeps
increasing.
Therefore, greening cellular networks is attracting tremendous research efforts in both academia and industry. Meanwhile, it has been shown that, with the aid of multicell cooperation, the performance of a cellular network in terms of throughput and coverage can be enhanced significantly. However, the potential of multicell cooperation on improving the energy efficiency of cellular networks remains to be unlocked. This article overviews the multicell cooperation solutions for improving the energy efficiency of cellular networks.
