User Association for Efficient Utilization of Green Energy in Cloud Radio Access Network

Energy efficiency (EE) is a key concern in diverse domains of next-generation mobile networks due to dramatic surge of energy consumption. Envisioning radio access network (RAN) with green energy offers a lower network operating cost together with maintaining eco-sustainability. This paper studies green energy driven user association (UA) policy for efficient utilization of green energy in cloud RAN (C-RAN) architecture. Under the proposed cellular networks, all the entities are powered by a combination of utility grid supply and renewable energy source with storage devices. In addition, different user association (UA) policies such as SINR based, distance based (i.e. conventional), green energy availability and traffic aware based are integrated with the proposed framework. Simulations are used to compare our algorithms in terms of throughput, EE and EE gain performance varying different system parameters. Numerical results validate that SINR based UA algorithm achieves superior EE performance compared to other counterparts.