Reduction of wireless network energy consumption is becoming increasingly important to reduce environmental footprint and operational costs. A key concept to achieve it is the use of lean transmission techniques that dynamically (de)activate hardware resources as a function of the load. In this paper, we propose a pioneering information-theoretic study of time-domain energy-saving techniques, relying on a practical hardware power consumption model of sleep and active modes. By minimizing the power consumption under a quality of service constraint (rate, latency), we propose simple yet powerful techniques to allocate power and choose which resources to activate or to put in sleep mode. Power consumption scaling regimes are identified. We show that a ``rush-to-sleep" approach (maximal power in fewest symbols followed by sleep) is only optimal in a high noise regime. It is shown how consumption can be made linear with the load and achieve massive energy reduction (factor of 10) at low-to-medium load. The trade-off between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) is also characterized, followed by a multi-user study based on time division multiple access (TDMA).

翻译：无线网络能耗的降低对于减少环境足迹和运营成本日益重要。实现这一目标的关键概念是采用轻量化传输技术，根据负载动态（去）激活硬件资源。本文提出了一项开创性的信息论研究，面向基于实际硬件功耗模型的休眠与活跃模式的时域节能技术。通过在服务质量（速率、时延）约束下最小化功耗，我们提出了简单而高效的功率分配与资源激活/休眠选择技术。确定了功耗缩放机制。研究表明，“快速休眠”方法（在最少符号数内使用最大功率后进入休眠）仅在高噪声环境下最优。我们展示了如何使功耗与负载呈线性关系，并在中低负载下实现大幅节能（10倍）。同时还刻画了能效与频谱效率之间的权衡，并基于时分多址进行了多用户研究。