Wireless Beyond the Third Generation — Facing the Energy Challenge

Jan M. Rabaey, (to be published and presented at) ISLPED August 2001.

After a stellar growth over the last decade driven by voice as the killer app, wireless communications is now rapidly moving into a new era propelled by data networking. For a wide host of devices, wireless will serve as the "last interconnection hop" to the high data-rate wired networks. The basic trends in these devices can be best summarized under the following two headers: "ubiquity" and "more bits/sec". Both of these have some important ramifications on energy dissipation. In this paper and accompanying presentation, we will outline the predominant trends in wireless, analyze the energy challenge of those, and examine a number of emerging solutions.