Energy management for cost minimization in green heterogeneous networks

Abstract

With the fast development of cyber–physical systems, mobile applications and traffic demands have been significantly increasing in this decade. Likewise, the concerns about the electricity consumption impacts on environments and the energy costs of wireless networks have also been growing greatly. In this paper, we study the problem of energy cost minimization in a heterogeneous networks with hybrid energy supplies, where the network architecture consists of radio access part and wireless backhaul links. Owing to the diversities of mobile traffic and renewable energy, the energy cost minimization problem involves both temporal and spatial dimensional optimization. We decompose the whole problem into four sub-problems and correspondingly our proposed solution consists of four parts: At first, we obtain estimated average energy consumption profiles for all base stations based on the temporal traffic statistics; Second, we formulate the green energy allocation optimization in the temporal domain to minimize energy cost for each BS. Third, given the allocated green energy and practical user distribution in each slot, we propose a centralized and a distributed user association algorithm to minimize total energy cost in the spatial dimension. Fourth, based on the actual user association scheme, we readjust the green energy allocation for each BS to further improve green energy utilization. Simulation results show that our proposed solution can significantly reduce the total energy cost, compared with the recent peer algorithms.