ETSI Headquarters, Sophia Antipolis, France – 16 May 2012

ETSI participates in award-winning research project on energy efficient solutions for wireless communication networks.

The EU-funded project EARTH has received the 2012 'Future Internet Award' prize for developing unprecedented energy efficiency solutions for wireless communication networks. The top prize was awarded at the Future Internet Week event, held in Aalborg, Denmark from 7-11 May 2012. Researchers from companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Telecom Italia, DOCOMO, and from universities in Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and UK, have optimized the energy use of 4G/LTE (Long-Term Evolution) base stations, which account for the highest energy consumption in the mobile network. ETSI participates in this project to ensure that the partners take account of ongoing standardization activities in ETSI and 3GPP, and feed their results back to the standards committees.

Optimizing the energy use of the network will gradually bring down electricity bills for operators and help keep mobile costs affordable, while reducing pollution and carbon emissions. By reducing the power required to operate each mobile base station, it is also expected that these stations could in future be operated reliably by renewable energy, further reducing emissions.

The project received €10 million of its nearly €15 million total budget from the EU's 7th Framework Programme for Research and Development (FP7) to support innovative ICT solutions, the balance being provided by the project partners themselves.

The EARTH project will present some of its research results at the forthcoming ETSI Workshop on Energy Efficiency, taking place in Genoa on 20-21 June 2012.

European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said: 'The ICT sector is growing but its carbon footprint should not follow. I congratulate the partners of the EARTH project who have found ways to deliver the services we need while reducing CO2 emissions and cutting down on energy bills.'

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Notes for Editors


About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose more than 700 member companies and organizations, drawn from 62 countries across 5 continents worldwide, determine its work programme and participate directly in its work. 
For more information please visit: www.etsi.org. 

About the EARTH project
EARTH is a highly ambitious and unique FP7 IP project, investigating the energy efficiency of mobile communication systems. It is applying an integrated approach and is committed to the development of a new generation of energy efficient equipment, comprising components, deployment strategies and network management solutions. The goal of the project is to address the global environmental challenge by investigating and proposing effective mechanisms to drastically reduce energy wastage and improve energy efficiency of mobile broadband communication systems, without compromising users' perceived "quality" of service and system capacity.

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