Abstract
The enormous growth in the cellular networks and ubiquitous wireless services has incurred momentous energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and thereby, imposed a great challenge to the development of energy-efficient sustainable cellular networks. With the augmentation of harvesting renewable energy, cellular base stations (BSs) are progressively being powered by renewable energy sources (RES) to reduce the energy crisis, carbon contents, and its dependency on conventional grid supply. Thus, the combined utilization of renewable energy sources with the electrical grid system is proving to be a more realistic option for developing an energy-efficient as well as an eco-sustainable system in the context of green mobile communications. The ultimate objective of this work is to develop a traffic-aware grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) optimal power supply system endeavoring the remote radio head (RRH) enabled heterogeneous networks (HetNets) aiming to minimize grid energy consumption and carbon footprint while ensuring long-term energy sustainability and energy efficiency (EE). Moreover, the load balancing technique is implemented among collocated BSs for better resource blocks (RBs) utilization and thereafter, the performance of the system is compared with an existing cell zooming enabled cellular architecture for benchmarking. Besides, the techno-economic feasibility of the envisaged system has been extensively analyzed using HOMER optimization software considering the dynamic nature of solar generation profile and traffic arrival rate. Furthermore, a thorough investigation is conducted with the help of Monte-Carlo simulations to assess the wireless network performance in terms of throughput, spectral efficiency (SE), and energy efficiency as well under a wide range of design scenarios. The numerical outcomes demonstrate that the proposed grid-tied solar PV/battery system can achieve a significant reduction of grid power consumption yielding up to 54.8% and ensure prominent energy sustainability with the effective modeling of renewable energy harvesting.
Highlights
Over the last decade, the high-tech advancement in mobile devices together with the increasing popularity of intensive multimedia applications has accelerated the astounding rise of data demand
This paper examined the feasibility of macro 2/2/2, macro omni, and micro base stations (BSs) provisioned to be powered by the grid-connected solar PV system with sufficient storage devices
The numerical results depict that the grid-tied solar PV system with macro 2/2/2 configuration significantly saves 8.8% of the overall net present cost and achieves a substantial improvement in CO2 savings yielding up to 88.64%
Summary
The high-tech advancement in mobile devices together with the increasing popularity of intensive multimedia applications has accelerated the astounding rise of data demand. The installation of HetNets potentially improve spatial reuse, and the capacity in the hotspot can minimize the coverage hole of the cellular network in dead spots which can save a significant amount of energy as well as extend the coverage while ensuring seamless connectivity and mobility in future generation cellular systems [24] In this trend, load balancing has appealed much consideration as a talented way out for higher resource allocation, better system enactment, and reduced operational expenditure as well. The non-uniform traffic density due to the tempo-spatial variations of mobile subscribers has incurred an unnecessary use of energy [32]–[34] To overcome this problem, telecom operators are dedicated to developing green mobile communication, which adaptively adjusts the cell size according to the user profile.
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