Abstract
The energy consumption of cellular networks has become increasingly important to cellular network operators, due to the significant economic and ecological influence of these networks in the future. The development of alternative energy technologies has resulted in the consideration of a solar powered base station (BS) as a long-term solution for the mobile cellular network industry, to reduce the operational expenditures and CO2 footprints of cellular networks. This study addresses the deployment and operational issues of a solar powered universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS; a third generation mobile cellular system) BS (i.e., Node B) that is currently deployed (i.e., UMTS Node B 2/2/2 and UMTS Node B 4/4/4). In addition, this study employs a hybrid optimization model for an electric renewable software simulator developed by the American National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Four key aspects are discussed in this study: optimal solar system architecture, energy production, the cash flow of the solar powered UMTS Node B project, and the economic feasibility of a solar powered system compared with traditional sources. Simulation results show that the proposed solution ensures 100% energy autonomy and long-term energy balance for the UMTS Node B, with cost effectiveness.
Highlights
The provision of high data traffic capacity and high data rates has been a longstanding focus in cellular networks
The results show that integrating renewable energy sources with base station (BS) sleep modes can result in significant energy savings, as well as a reduction of the solar system size
The project lifetime is a crucial issue because it affects the total project cost, which is reflected in the economic feasibility of the project
Summary
The provision of high data traffic capacity and high data rates has been a longstanding focus in cellular networks. A popular method for enhancing a cellular network’s energy efficiency is to design and optimize the power saving communication protocols These protocols adjust the transceivers’ transmission power based on the network’s intensity of data traffic. Various methods used to switch off a precise number of Node Bs in a universal mobile telecommunications system’s (UMTS) cellular network during low data traffic periods, were discussed in [10,11,12,13]. A novel optimization model that can be employed to save energy in a UMTS cellular access network was presented in [13] This optimization model considers the gradual temporal variations in traffic through the dynamic switching on and off of entire BS sites. The current study adopts a hybrid optimization model for electric renewables (HOMER), to to perform a techno-economic feasibility analysis of the solar powered UMTS Node B.
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