Telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent and other members of the Greentouch Consortium on Tuesday unveiled a large scale antenna system that is capable of drastically reducing mobile network energy consumption without adversely affecting service.
Stated in a press release, the proof-of-concept technology, developed by Paris-based Alcatel’s Bell Labs (News - Alert), uses multiple antennas to power a transmission, rather than just the one that is predominately used today. Alcatel and other Greentouch members found that stringing together a series of antennas gives them enough power to focus an energy beam directly to a user's cell phone, instead of sending it in all directions. By creating one focused beam, the amount of energy that is required to connect a call drops significantly.
"You can drop the total power of the base station proportionally to the number of antennas used," Dan Kipler, a Bell Labs optical networks scientist and Chair of the GreenTouch technical committee, noted during a demonstration in London.
"In a 10-antenna system, each antenna uses 100 times less power than a single antenna system. In 100-antenna system, each antenna uses 10,000 times less," Kipler added.
Gee Rittenhouse, Head of research at the laboratory, told Bloomberg (News - Alert) News that the technology can effectively reduce energy consumption by 97 percent, while causing no health risks. Furthermore, it won't necessitate the modification of today's mobile phones. When the antenna system is implemented, transmission stations will only have to change their aerials and algorithms.
“Because we’ve lowered the energy and focused the beam, the user sees no change -- no change in quality, no change in performance,” Rittenhouse told Bloomberg. “From the user’s perspective it’s exactly the same signal, but from the transmitter’s perspective we’re able to do this at a much, much lower amount of power.”
Due to the fact that these low-power transmissions are so focused, they can support the same bandwidth and range as today's single antenna systems, added Greg Wright, a Bell Labs Wireless Researcher.
Greentouch, a consortium of 35 companies, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations, was founded by Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) about a year ago in the hopes of reducing network energy consumption by a factor of 1,000. Rittenhouse said that the current technology is capable of single-handedly lowering consumption by a factor of 30, and that the consortium will try and create innovative wire line systems, and switching and routing technologies to try and make up the difference and reach their goal.
Alcatel and the rest of Greentouch will continue to tweak the antenna technology before they roll out it to the public.
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Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jamie Epstein
