Joint Load Control and Energy Sharing for Autonomous Operation of 5G Mobile Networks in Micro-Grids

In this paper, we focus on the design of energy self-sustainable mobile networks by enabling intelligent energy management that allows the base stations to mostly operate off-grid by using renewable energies. Many papers are available in the literature on this problem, and however, we are approaching this issue from a different angle. In fact, we advocate for future mobile networks with a hierarchical cell structure and powered by energy harvesting hardware. Base stations within the same geographical area are grouped in a micro-grid and operate almost autonomously from the power grid. To achieve this goal, we target the design of the optimal traffic and computational load control method with energy sharing within the micro-grid. We solve the optimization problem using a graph-based method, and we demonstrate, via software simulations, that a combination of load control plus energy sharing represents a viable and economically convenient solution for enabling energy self-sustainability of mobile networks grouped in micro-grids.