  Connectivity on-the-go has been one of the most impressive technological
achievements in the 2010s decade. However, multiple studies show that this has
come at an expense of increased carbon footprint, that also rivals the entire
aviation sector's carbon footprint. The two major contributors of this
increased footprint are (a) smartphone batteries which affect the embodied
footprint and (b) base-stations that occupy ever-increasing energy footprint to
provide the last mile wireless connectivity to smartphones. The root-cause of
both these turn out to be the same, which is communicating over the last-mile
lossy wireless medium. We show in this paper, titled DensQuer, how base-station
densification, which is to replace a single larger base-station with multiple
smaller ones, reduces the effect of the last-mile wireless, and in effect
conquers both these adverse sources of increased carbon footprint. Backed by a
open-source ray-tracing computation framework (Sionna), we show how a strategic
densification strategy can minimize the number of required smaller
base-stations to practically achievable numbers, which lead to about 3x
power-savings in the base-station network. Also, DensQuer is able to also
reduce the required deployment height of base-stations to as low as 15m, that
makes the smaller cells easily deployable on trees/street poles instead of
requiring a dedicated tower. Further, by utilizing newly introduced hardware
power rails in Google Pixel 7a and above phones, we also show that this
strategic densified network leads to reduction in mobile transmit power by
10-15 dB, leading to about 3x reduction in total cellular power consumption,
and about 50% increase in smartphone battery life when it communicates data via
the cellular network.
