Cooperating heterogeneous wireless elements provide advanced problem solving capabilities and improved services. At the same time, low energy solutions create attractive business case offering significant benefits in terms of products dependability, and operation costs. CONSERN project addresses those challenges through the Self-growing paradigm, combining autonomic and collaborative capacities towards serving energy efficiency in heterogeneous networking environments. This paper describes the CONSERN Self-growing Functional Architecture, realised by a set of mechanisms and enablers which have been deployed in a real life proof-of-concept testbed.