The project Communicate Green is funded by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMWi) and is a collaboration between Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ericsson GmbH, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Universität Paderborn and Technische Universität Berlin.

In order to fulfill today's high demands on mobile network usage, mobile network providers in Germany have around 100.000 base stations working 24/7. The permanent availability of those network components causes a significant energy consumption. Communicate Green is about implementing an adaptive, context-aware and technology-comprehensive power management in radio networks by maintaining the high quality of experience at the same time. The decision and adaptation algorithms that are going to be implemented throughout the project are going to save energy in mobile networks by dynamically de- and reactivating network components and by reconfiguring the network to user needs based on context information aggregated from network components, end devices and other context sources. Optimizations will be proposed for single and heterogeneous radio technologies as well as for the core network.

With the optimizations being done in the mobile network, we estimate a reduction of the operating time of network components up to 40% - 60%, i.e., a reduction of the carbon dioxide emission up to 328.000 to 1.974.000 tons per year. These expected results show that the projects approach is innovative and promises an enormous reduction of the power consumption in future mobile networks