Telecommunication networks are responsible for approximately 2% of the global energy consumption. As part of the worldwide effort to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse emission, improving energy efficiency of telecommunication networks has received significant interest. For instance, Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission/reception is a promising technique for energy conservation in cellular networks. By adaptively managing the RF/baseband resources across basestations in a coordinated manner, network power usage can be significantly reduced without compromising the system performance. This also allows certain network nodes to be turned off or operate in low power state exploiting the local demand variations in the network.

Improving energy efficiency also needs to consider future networks shifting towards more diversified services. Exemplary application scenarios include smart metering, wireless sensor monitoring, and machine-to-machine communication. These scenarios introduce new traffic behaviors and due to the smaller packet sizes and the extremely large number of devices, improving energy efficiency while reducing device cost is vital. There is an increasing need for energy efficient solutions to enable new smart and energy efficient devices to simultaneously share the network with co-existing conventional devices that have much larger data and energy consumption demands.

The goal of this special issue is to give a comprehensive overview on energy-efficient wireless communication for future networks and devices. Original contributions are invited on the latest advancements in areas including energy-efficient communication, smart metering, energy harvesting, energy conservation with CoMP, and machine-type communication. Topics of interest within the scope of this special issue include but are not limited to:

• Energy-efficient communication techniques
• Energy conservation through CoMP coordination and mobile infrastructure
• Energy consumption analysis in realistic traffic models and QoS requirements
• Scheduler algorithms design and analysis for delay/power constraint communication
• Cost-effective and energy-efficient machine-type-communication (MTC)
• Scalability of designs with number of devices and the size of the network
• New categories of devices and modeling of associated power constraints and behavior

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