Dynamic Energy Management for Smart-Grid-Powered Coordinated Multipoint Systems

Due to increasing threats of global warming and climate change concerns, green wireless communications have recently drawn intense attention toward reducing carbon emissions. Aligned with this goal, the present paper deals with dynamic energy management for smart-grid powered coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmissions. To address the intrinsic variability of renewable energy sources, a novel energy transaction mechanism is introduced for grid-connected base stations that are also equipped with an energy storage unit. Aiming to minimize the expected energy transaction cost while guaranteeing the worst-case users’ quality of service, an infinite-horizon optimization problem is formulated to obtain the optimal downlink transmit beamformers that are robust to channel uncertainties. Capitalizing on the virtual-queue-based relaxation technique and the stochastic dual-subgradient method, an efficient online algorithm is developed yielding a feasible and asymptotically optimal solution. Numerical tests with synthetic and real data corroborate the analytical performance claims and highlight the merits of the novel approach.