Sustainable communication and networking in two-tier green cellular networks

With the advances of green energy technologies, clean and sustainable energy sources have been considered as alternative energy sources for powering cellular networks. However, it is very challenging to exploit the charged energy to satisfy the QoS demands of wireless multimedia services due to the dynamics in the energy charging and discharging processes. In this article, we study how to efficiently utilize the green energy supply to fulfill the QoS requirements of multimedia services in a cellular network. Specifically, we study network deployment and power allocation of small cell BSs in a two-tier cellular network in support of high-rate multimedia services. Our objective is to maximize the transmission efficiency while ensuring energy sustainability in green cellular networks powered by green energy sources. For network deployment, we aim to deploy the minimum number of small cell BSs to meet the high throughput demands of multimedia services and statistically guarantee energy sustainability of wireless networks. In addition, a power allocation scheme with cooperative communication is presented to maximize throughput. It is shown that the network sustainability and throughput of green cellular networks can be significantly improved by using the proposed BS placement and power allocation schemes.