Feasibility analysis of solar powered base stations for sustainable heterogeneous networks

The unprecedented growth in the number of user terminals and the ubiquitous availability of internet access, cellular networks worldwide are deploying a higher number of base stations in their infrastructure leading to a massive inflation in energy consumption. Renewable energy harvesting (EH) technology is expected to pervasively attractive solution in the modern Long-term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks to reduce operational expenditures (OPEX) and carbon footprints. This paper investigates the feasibility of solar energy solutions for heterogeneous networks (HetNet) with guaranteed sustainability and reliability. The scaling of power consumption of LTE base stations (BSs) in accordance with traffic pattern variations is considered to be an effective method of improving energy efficiency (EE). The objective is to dimensioning the optimal solar powered cellular architecture and minimizations the overall expenditures over a period of 10 years accounting the temporal variation of traffic intensity. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cellular system in terms of reduction of energy consumption and net present cost while maintaining the quality of service (QoS).