The exponential growth of mobile traffic, associated with the emergence of new services and the expected explosion of the number of connected objects, i.e., Internet of Things (IoT) will make effective monitoring, modelling, and overall control of network traffic difficult. Hence, there is a need for powerful methods to solve the challenges faced in network design, deployment and management. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been successfully applied to various domains such as medicine, finance and astronomy, to name a few. Now a new research axis about the use of artificial intelligence for enhancing green and effective communication networks is becoming a real opportunity for controlling networks energy consumption, optimizing content delivery and developing new services capitalizing on data collection and learning.

The main goal of the industry-driven European Celtic AI4Green project is to achieve an improvement of about 30-40% of the end-to-end energy efficiency compared to current networks. This target is very challenging but possible considering results obtained by IT industries for operating data centres and access networks for instance. These network segments are the most energy consuming parts of the IT infrastructure.