This document analyzes the sustainability of broadband wireless access (BWA). It discusses the challenges of the wireless and broadband aspects of BWA, including variability of the media, mobility, location challenges, and high energy consumption of always-on stations. It proposes new metrics to measure BWA sustainability and analyzes the potential paradoxes of efficiency increasing consumption. Examples are given of how BWA can enable benefits like reducing transportation sector footprint and aiding emergency operations. Approaches are outlined for regulators to contain the footprint of BWA through improved efficiency and new contract models.

1. Sustainability Analysis of
Broadband wireless access (BWA)
Reza Farrahi Moghaddam and Mohamed Cheriet
Synchromedia Lab, ETS
Green Sustainable Telco Cloud (GSTC) Project
July 18th, 2014, ETS, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

2. Outline
• Broadband wireless access (BWA)
• Performance Metrics
• The ‘Next’ Paradox, Beyond the Rebound Effect
• Wireless Access – Examples of Enabling Benefits
• ICT (including BWA) Residuals
• Regulatory Approaches to Contain BWA
Footprint
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3. Broadband wireless access (BWA)
• Challenges of wireless aspect:
– Variability of media (Noise and interference)
– Mobility of the end
– Not-knowing of the location of the end (Directional antennas)
• Challenges of the broadband aspect:
– Capacity (Dual connectivity; Proximity services; LTE-U)
• LTE-advanced (3GPP Release 12)
– Competition with other wireless services
• Challenges of the energy consumption aspect:
– Always-on stations
• Along temporal dimension
• Along spatial dimension
– Interference cancelation (LTE-U, 5.8 GHz band)
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4. Performance Metrics
• Traditional metrics:
– Joule/bit: 0.33-0.62 kJ/Mbit for LTE (at 7.4-0.5 Mbps/km2) [2]
– W/km2: 0.65 kW/km2 for LTE (area = 2.7 km2) [2]
• Proposed metrics:
– Joule/(m2bit) at max throughput: 0.33/2.7 (=0.12) J/(km2kbit)
• Spatial (Horizontal) Penetration
• Max Capacity
• It is not just the hardware management
– Software, especially protocols
• Adjustability vs Abstraction (Virtualization)
– Vertical Penetration across the layers (stacks)
• Easily can be generalized to hybrid systems (wired/wireless)
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5. The ‘Next’ Paradox, Beyond the
Rebound Effect
• The baseline paradox (The Khazoom-Brookes Postulate):
– “Energy efficiency” increases “energy consumption”
– It could be interpreted to promote “limiting access” instead of
“efficiency” as a measure toward sustainability
• The limits of the baseline paradox:
– Assumption of a single region:
• Not valid in a global world
– Assumption of sustainability-ignorant costumers:
• Not valid: Many of sustainability actions are actually costumer-driven
– Assumption of zero level of regulability:
• Not valid: A changing landscape
• The proposed ‘Next’ Paradox:
– “Not providing access” increases “energy consumption”
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6. The ‘Next’ Paradox, Cont’d
• The ‘Next’ Paradox:
– “Not providing access” increases “energy consumption”
• The mechanisms behind the ‘Next’ paradox:
– A. Relocation:
• The world has multiple regions that mostly are uncontrollable by a particular decision
maker
• Knowledge (Technology) without border:
– Everything is replicable anywhere
– B. Imported consumption:
• Multi-regional businesses would easily and implicitly import accountable consumption
incurred in other regions to the target region
– C. Losing the opportunities to engage customers in the sustainable actions
• Unmotivated customers would be more likely to become more selfish
• Implementing a self-driven sustainable ecosystem:
– Engaging everybody (including the end users)
– Understanding their needs
– Behavior engineering
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7. Wireless Access – Examples of
Enabling Benefits
• A. Reduction of Transport Sector’s footprint:
– Ex: Less fuel consumption by better and dynamic trip planning
– Ex: By avoiding Missed exits on highways
• B. Infrastructure of emergency operations
– Natural disasters: Land slides/flooding could fail the wired networks
– Every surviving station could act as an emergency hot spot (Sandy’s case;
Group communication over LTE)
• Health care expenditures
– 2013: B$211 Total health spending in Canada ($5,988 per person) [4]
• A. Higher spending per person for youth and elderly age groups
– Automated, smart house and care services
• B. Drugs accounted for B$34.5 (16.3%)
– 1998: Depression/Psychological spending was 16% of total drug spending
– Psychological interventions is more cost effective than drugs [5]
» The role of Connectivity and Social Networks
» If 5% reduction in total spending is achieved, with a rate of $0.5/kWh, it is equivalent to
21.1 TWh energy saving (or 1% of total energy consumption of Canada)
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8. ICT (including BWA) Residuals
• The performance metrics should differentiate
between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bits:
– A. Advertisement-driven Business models
• Up to 50% of the delivered bits could come from not ‘useful’
ad content
– B. Zero-dollar, but inefficient devices are promoted to
customers
• The responsibility is unfairly shifted to customers
– C. Inefficient protocols
• ‘extra-added’, ‘packet-dropout’, and ‘delayed’ bits
• The capacity of the physical media could be several times
larger than the achievable limit of a protocol
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9. Regulatory Approaches to Contain
BWA Footprint
• Everybody-in-the-Loop (EitL) Framework [6]:
– Everybody, including the providers and decision makers, should take
responsibility
– This responsibility could be translated into ‘charges’ and ‘fees’
• Change (decrease, increase, or exchange) in behavior
• Efficiency:
– Efficiency: Smart management of resources along time and space
– New and novel ‘contract’ models that allow dynamic and awarded
participation of customers in ‘mirco’-scale sustainable actions
– Development of new protocols to approach to the limits of ‘dark’ media
• Dark fiber capacity expansion
• Less hardware means less upstream footprint (LCA)
• Footprint along spatial dimension:
– Edge Cloud
– Mobile Cloud
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10. References
• [1] - Astely, David, Erik Dahlman, Gabor Fodor, Stefan Parkvall, and Joachim Sachs.
"LTE release 12 and beyond,” IEEE Communications Magazine, 51(7), 2013.
• [2] – Gunther Auer, et al. “Energy efficiency analysis of the reference systems,
areas of improvements and target breakdown,” Deliverable 2.3, INFSO-ICT-247733
EARTH, 2010.
• [3] – CEET, “The power of wireless cloud: An analysis of the energy consumption of
wireless cloud,” The University of Melbourne, 2013.
• [4] – Canadian Institute for Health Information, “National Health Expenditure
Trends, 1975 to 2013,” Oct 2013.
• [5] - Hunsley, J. “The cost effectiveness of psychological interventions,” Canadian
Psychological Association, May 2002.
• [6] - Farrahi Moghaddam, Reza, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, and Mohamed
Cheriet. "A Multi-Entity Input Output (MEIO) Approach to Sustainability-Water-
Energy-GHG (WEG) Footprint Statements in Use Cases from Auto and Telco
Industries," arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.6227, April 2014.
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11. Thank you!
www.synchromedia.ca