Intelligent Energy Cooperation Framework for Green Cellular Base Stations

Cellular operators are increasingly deploying a clean renewable energy (RE) resource like solar with zero carbon emission as an alternative using conventional electricity in order to maintain profitability. Owing to the dynamics of RE generation, green energy may not guarantee sufficient power supplies for base stations (BSs). To enhance sustainable network operations, we envision future BSs to be powered by hybrid supplies including commercial grid supply or diesel generators (DG) in conjunction with the solar array. This paper focuses a hybrid energy sharing framework among RE powered BSs via physical power lines. Under the proposed framework, each BS is equipped with onsite green energy harvester having an independent storage device and the BSs share excess electricity through resistive power cables to reduce dependency on the traditional energy supply. An extensive simulation-based study in the downlink of a long term evolution (LTE) cellular system is carried out for evaluating the benefits of energy cooperation, eco-sustainability and cost-effectiveness of the proposed framework. The prime objective is the energy optimization in such networks by maximizing solar energy utilization considering the temporal dynamics of traffic intensity and RE generation. Results show that considerable reduction in average energy consumption is attained through energy sharing scheme.