This is a code package is related to the following scientific article:
Emil Björnson, Erik G. Larsson, "How Energy-Efficient Can a Wireless Communication System Become?," Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, 2018.
The package contains a simulation environment, based on Matlab, that reproduces all the numerical results and figures in the article. We encourage you to also perform reproducible research!
The data traffic in wireless networks is steadily growing. The long-term trend follows Cooper's law, where the traffic is doubled every two-and-a-half year, and it will likely continue for decades to come. The data transmission is tightly connected with the energy consumption in the power amplifiers, transceiver hardware, and baseband processing. The relation is captured by the energy efficiency metric, measured in bit/Joule, which describes how much energy is consumed per correctly received information bit. While the data rate is fundamentally limited by the channel capacity, there is currently no clear understanding of how energy-efficient a communication system can become. Current research papers typically present values on the order of 10 Mbit/Joule, while previous network generations seem to operate at energy efficiencies on the order of 10 kbit/Joule. Is this roughly as energy-efficient future systems (5G and beyond) can become, or are we still far from the physical limits? These questions are answered in this paper. We analyze a different cases representing potential future deployment and hardware characteristics.
The article contains 3 simulation figures, numbered 1, 3, and 4. These are generated by the Matlab scripts simulationFigure1.m, simulationFigure3.m, and simulationFigure4.m, respectively.
See each file for further documentation.
This paper was supported by ELLIIT and grants from the Swedish Foun- dation for Strategic Research (SSF) and the Swedish Research Council (VR).
This code package is licensed under the GPLv2 license. If you in any way use this code for research that results in publications, please cite our original article listed above.