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Green communication and networking is essential to the sustainable development of not only ICT industry itself, but also the whole economic value chain. Taking 5G mobile communication network as an example, which has been widely recognized as the foundation and the key enabling technology of digitalized smart society, the total energy consumption of the stand-alone approach might be 10+ folds compared with the existing 4G networks. As a result, if without breakthroughs in the greening technologies, the smart society would never be sustainable if not impossible.
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Zhisheng Niu (2020) studied this question.
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