Joint Resource Allocation and Dynamic Activation of Energy Harvesting Small Cells in OFDMA HetNets

We jointly optimize resource allocation with the dynamic activation of energy harvesting base stations in a two-tier orthogonal frequency-division multiple access-based heterogeneous network. We consider both energy harvesting constraints and interference constraints along with time-variation in channel condition, user activity, and energy arrival. We optimize the trade-off between throughput performance of the small cell (or hotspot) users and the associated power cost by maximizing the net reward, where positive reward is associated with achievable throughput of the hotspot users and negative reward with the corresponding non-renewable power consumption. Quality-of-service requirements of hotspot users as well as macrocell users are considered in the optimization problem. Assuming the availability of non-causal information, we propose offline resource allocation algorithm using discrete binary particle swarm optimization and dual decomposition technique. Assuming the availability of statistical information of future values, we propose dynamic programming-based online algorithm. Finally, we propose simple and greedy online algorithm assuming lack of any kind of future information. Numerical results demonstrate the performances of the proposed offline, dynamic programming-based online, and greedy online algorithms and highlight the scenarios, where the performance of the proposed algorithms is significantly better than the baseline schemes.