Fairness in multi-operator energy sharing

Abstract

The present paper studies fair sharing possibilities of stored renewable energy (RE) in densely populated areas among multiple mobile network operators (MNOs). The main objective is to enable MNOs, who already share their infrastructure in terms of a green network operation, to further reduce their power consumption by fairly sharing (i) the solar power harvested during daylight and (ii) the harvested energy that is stored in storage devices, e.g. batteries, during night hours. To this end, a bankruptcy game is designed so as to capture the energy sharing interactions among MNOs. Taking into consideration the energy deficits of each MNO for a studied period of time, Shapley Value (SV) is employed to fairly determine the amounts of energy to be allocated to each MNO. Focusing on night hours, it is shown that the proposed scheme provides all cooperative MNOs with long store-energy-based network operation during night in comparison to baseline schemes. Moreover, we display that the proposed scheme outperforms its counterparts in terms of needed grid support and allocation fairness among the cooperative MNOs for different MNO traffic patterns and volumes.