ABSTRACT
The unequivocality of global man-made climate change has attracted substantial governmental and political intervention [1,2] across the world to address the urgency of this phenomenon. Correspondingly, the conservation efforts striving for greener technology options [3,4], energyefficient solutions [5,6], and carbon emissions savings opportunities [7,8] have been gradually leveraged upon the research communities [9], industrial companies [4,10], and regulatory bodies [3] toward realizing a global low-carbon society. Statistics released by the Global eSustainability Initiative [7] reveal that worldwide carbon emissions will rise from 40 billion tons (Gt) carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per annum (pa) in 2002 to approximately 53 GtCO2e by 2020, in which the information and communications technology (ICT) sector has been identified as one of the key areas in mitigating the world’s carbon footprint because of its astounding direct contribution of 2% by consuming 3% of the worldwide energy with a growth rate of 6% pa [5,11]. In addition to the expected growth in mature developed markets, the explosive growth in the number of mobile, fixed, and broadband subscribers on a global basis, which is attributable to the emerging ICT demand in developing countries [7], inevitably requires extensive mobile networks supported by greater amount of power-hungry base transceiver stations (BTSs) and mobile switching centers, thus incurring enormous stress upon network operators to suppress the resulting infrastructure carbon footprint with a projected growth from 133 million tons (Mt) CO2 to 299 MtCO2 by 2020 at an annual incremental rate of 5%.
