Mobile communication is a cornerstone technology in our society, facilitating personal relationships, fostering cooperation, and advancing education. Each generation of this technology has brought new services, from voice calls and messaging to internet access, and now Artificial Intelligence (AI). This transformation has steadily augmented the mobile network resource requirements. Driven by the societal and economical needs to increase the mobile network energy efficiency, reduce its energy consumption and the associated environmental footprint, this comment surveys standardized metrics to assess energy-related network performance and overview data-driven state-of-the-art solutions to accelerate the energy transition of mobile networks.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank David Lopez-Perez, Paolo Gemma, Xinli Geng, Nan Zhao, and Qitao Song for their support to this work.
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All authors contributed substantially to the discussion of the content. A.D.D., N.P. and X.Z. researched, wrote, and edited the paper. X.L., M.O. and X.C. reviewed the manuscript before submission.
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De Domenico, A., Piovesan, N., Zhou, X. et al. Advancing green mobile networks. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71562-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71562-1
