Profit-Driven User Association and Smart Grid Energy Transfer in Green Cellular Networks

On-grid brown energy consumption of cellular infrastructure is contributing to the detrimental impact on the environment, among which base stations (BSs) are guzzling the largest amount of energy in powering the cellular infrastructure. Leveraging green (renewable) energy to power cellular BSs is a radical energy solution. However, in order to minimize the consumption of on-grid brown energy, most related researches focus on maximizing the utilization of green energy in cellular BSs while compromising the user quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we jointly consider the network QoS and green energy utilization in the dual-battery architecture enabled green cellular network. The profit-driven user association and smart grid green energy transfer scheme is proposed to benefit the network providers, in which, some heuristics are further developed to reduce the computational complexity, as the profit-driven user association problem is NP-hard. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the proposed scheme. The systematic analysis of this work can serve as a benchmark for greening other information and communication technology infrastructures.