Joint energy cooperation and resource allocation in C-RANs with hybrid energy sources

With the development of energy harvesting technologies and smart grid, the future trend of radio access networks will present a multi-source power supply. Energy flows are not only between remote radio heads but also between remote radio heads and the grid. In this paper, joint renewable energy cooperation and resource allocation for cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) with hybrid power supplies (including both the conventional grid and renewable energy sources) is investigated. Our objective is to maximize the sum rate of the overall network while satisfying the total energy cost constraint. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, which is NP-hard. To solve this problem, an improved hybrid-fitness function evolutionary (HFFE) algorithm is developed. Our simulation results show that the network utility achieves a 40% gain, as compared to the scheme without energy cooperation.