Efficient Usage of Renewable Energy in Communication Systems Using Dynamic Spectrum Allocation and Collaborative Hybrid Powering

In this paper, we introduce a new green resource allocation problem using hybrid powering of communication systems from renewable and nonrenewable sources. The objective is to efficiently allocate the power delivered from the different micro-grids to satisfy the network requirements. Minimizing a defined power cost function instead of the net power consumption aims to encourage the use of the available renewable power through collaboration between the base stations within and outside the different micro-grids. The different degrees of freedom in the system, ranging from assignment of users to base stations, possibility of switching the unnecessary base stations to the sleep mode, dynamic power allocation, and dynamic allocation of the available bandwidth, allow us to achieve important power cost savings. Since the formulated optimization problem is a mixed integer-real problem with a nonlinear objective function, we propose to solve the problem using the branch and bound (B&B) approach, which allows to obtain the optimal or a suboptimal solution with a known distance to the optimal. The relaxed problem is shown to be a convex optimization which allows to obtain the lower bound. For practical applications with large number of users, we propose a heuristic solution based on decomposing the problem into two subproblems. The users-to-base stations assignment is solved using an algorithm inspired from the bin-packing approach while the bandwidth allocation is performed through the bulb-search approach. Simulation results confirm the important savings in the nonrenewable power consumption when using the proposed approach and the efficiency of the proposed disjointed algorithms.