Renewable Energy Assisted Sustainable and Environment Friendly Energy Cooperation in Cellular Networks

Abstract

In this paper, an energy cost minimization framework is presented for a green cellular network. The proposed novel energy cooperation scheme ensures optimal energy cooperation among grid-connected green cellular base stations (BSs). The framework is both economical and environment-friendly where the energy is saved by cutting down on the grid energy and sharing surplus green energy among the BSs. The intended scenario requires knowledge of harvested energy as well as traffic awareness to determine energy demand of a BS and inter-BS connectivity for incorporating energy transfer. A realistic utility function is developed to minimize energy cost under various constraints which entail energy borrowing from neighboring BSs (offering their surplus energy which is cheaper than grid and diesel generator), thereby reducing the overall energy cost of the network. The proposed framework for energy cooperation has bilinear non-convex structure. We use McCormick envelopes to convexify the optimization problem and transform the bilinear non-convex optimization into a linear optimization problem. The numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed traffic aware sustainable and environmental friendly BS operation through energy cooperation.