Background

The importance of mobile broadband communications has increased significantly in recent years. Large amounts and various types of data are transmitted nowadays via mobile broadband to and from the Internet. Nevertheless, the energy use and environmental implications of the necessary infrastructure are not well known yet.

Problem statement

The goal of the thesis is to estimate the energy use that can be attributed to content delivery over a mobile broadband network. The mobile broadband technology of interest is 3G, potentially LTE. The project should focus on the components that constitute the core network, the mobile backhaul, the mobile base station and the user equipment.

The student should collect existing data on the energy consumption of the components and develop a reasonable way to allocate the energy consumption to the actual data delivery. A possible extension of the study is to compare cellular content delivery to content delivery over WiFi, or femtocells, technologies that are supposed to complement the current macrocell based mobile broadband in the near future .

The thesis work will be performed in collaboration with the Centre for Sustainable Communications (CESC) at KTH.  Starting date is January 10, 2010.

We are looking for a motivated student with a good track record, who is interested in working in a competitive environment. A good knowledge of networking protocols and network architectures is necessary.

Contact

Kontakta Dán György, tel +46 8 790 42 53!