To meet the dramatic growth in wireless data traffic driven by the popularity of new mobile devices and mobile applications, the fifth generation (5G) of cellular technology has recently attracted a lot of research interest from both academia and industry (see, e.g., [1]). As compared with its fourth generation (4G) counterpart, 5G is expected to achieve a roughly 1000 times data rate increase via dense base station (BS) deployments and advanced physical layer communication techniques [1]. However, the large number of BSs will lead to large energy consumption and high electricity bills for cellular operators, which amounts to a large portion of their operational expenditure. For example, China Mobile owned around 920000 BSs in 2011 and the total energy cost per year was almost 3 billion US dollars, given that the annual cost for each BS is about 3000 US dollars [2]. Therefore, in the 5G era, it is becoming necessary for these cellular operators to reduce their energy costs by employing new cost-saving solutions in the design of cellular BSs, which are our main focus in this chapter.
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