With the global energy and environment crisis getting worse, energy saving and emission reduction become issues that should be seriously treated by the governments. Green communication network, as the sustainable communication network built to save energy, reduce emission, and make effective use of network and spectrum resources, has become the focus in communication industry. Concerning the optimized design and product R&D of green communication, FuTURE FORUM and Huawei Technologies co-organized Workshop on Energy-Saving Green Communication Products in Beihang University. The workshop, hosted by Prof. You Xiaohu, Secretary-General of FuTURE FORUM, is one of the series of activities hosted by Academic Division of CAS and Beihang University to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Science China. Mr. Zhang Zhaotian, Vice Director of Department of Information Sciences of NSFC, Mr. Ni Xiaolong, Director from Department of Science and Technology of MIIT, and Mr. Shi Yongchao, Editor in Chief of Science China attended the workshops and made addresses.

Representatives from operators, universities, and enterprises such as CATR, China Mobile, China Telecom, Huawei, Tsinghua University, USTC, Xidian University, HUST, SHRCWC, and Motorola gave reports on research background, R&D stresses, current challenges and corresponding solutions.

The experts pointed out that information and communication industry, as the major energy consumer, accounts for 2% to 6% of the global energy consumption and the proportion keeps increasing rapidly, as the mobile services have been growing by rate of 400% during recent years which will lead to higher energy consumption and higher demand on spectrum resources. The current development mode will seriously impact the environment and pose a big pressure on energy consumption. In addition to public responsibility, the increase of cost and shortage of resources will become the shackles for the development of mobile communication industry. Faced by these challenges, we should give more consideration to service requirement and how to design the future mobile communication network to realize higher resource utilization.

On this workshop, the experts agreed that the future requirement on energy efficiency cannot be met only by the improvement of component technologies. The experts proposed many solutions and research orientations for the energy-saving subjects from various aspects of components, device and networks, adopting new ideas on communication protocols, network structures and system actualization. Prof. Niu Zhisheng from Tsinghua University suggested constructing Globally Resource-optimized and Energy-Efficient Networks, proposing that the network should be intellectualized to save energy through dynamics, convergence and difference of services.

Expert from China Mobile introduced the central deployment of green C-RAN networks. Concerning the challenges on flow, cost, and power consumption, China Mobile proposed the optimized RAN structure to seek effective solutions to cut down the number of base station motor rooms, aggregate resources, allocate dynamic resources and adopt collaborative wireless access technologies. The vision of C-RAN developed by China Mobile includes decreasing the number of base stations by Cloud central processing, reducing electricity consumption and cost for operation and maintenance, realizing the adaptive and dynamic balance of network loads through high-band optical transmission, and actualizing collaborative multi-point transmission through distributed RRU so as to improve the spectrum utilization.

As one of the host of the workshop, Huawei elaborated the necessity and urgency of green communication R&D from the perspective of manufacturers, agreeing that green network, with its unique research and technologies will be specially stressed by the international communication manufacturers in competition. Mr. Xu Shugong, representing Huawei, pointed out that the industrial and regional access permission posed higher requirements on energy consumption. ETSI of EU and ATIS of America are working on the regional permission and testing standards, and the threshold is expected to keep rising continuously in the future. Faced with the strong research requirement and the competition from western world, we are in urgent demand on lifting the research on low-consumption and high-efficiency communication network to a national strategic level and to realize the independent innovation. Currently, many green projects were set up internationally with clear targets, such as EARTH Project under the 7th Framework, Green Touch Project of Bell Lab, and Cool Silicon Project of Germany. Huawei also proposed its green project named GREAT, and suggested to seize the opportunity to unify the superiorities in production, academy and research in the R&D work to ensure the sustainable competitiveness of China’s communication industry.

FuTURE FORUM YOU Xiaohu	MIIT NI Xiaolong
NSFC  ZHANG Zhaotian	Science China SHI Yongchao
NSFC XIONG Xiaoyun	FuTURE FORUM FU Jun
HUAWEI XU Shugong	USTC  ZHU Jinkang
Tsinghua University NIU Zhisheng	China Moblie CHEN Mo
CATR SHI Youkang	Tsinghua University XU Mingwei
Motorola XU Ning	China Telecom TAN Guangquan
China Moblie BIAN Sen	HUST YU Li
SHRCWC YANG Yang	XIDIAN ZHAO Liqiang