Profit Driven User Association with Dual Batteries in Green Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Owing to the impact of greenhouse gases on the environment and climate change, the on-grid energy consumption of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has received much attention in recent years. Cellular networks are among the major energy guzzlers in ICT, and their contributions to the global energy consumption increase rapidly. In cellular networks, base stations (BSs) account for more than 50 percent of the energy consumption. Utilizing green energy to power BSs is essential to save the on-grid energy and reduce the electricity expenditure of the network providers. However, in order to furthest save on-gird energy, most existing works only focus on maximizing the green energy utilization, while compromising the services received by the mobile users. In fact, dissatisfaction of services eventually leads to loss of market shares and profits of the network providers. Therefore, we propose a novel profit driven user association scheme for green heterogeneous cellular networks by jointly considering the green energy utilization and traffic delivery latency to maximize the profit of the network providers. Since this profit driven user association problem is NP-hard, we further propose some heuristics to maximize the profit with low computational complexity. Finally, we validate the performance of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations.