A Base Station DTX Scheme for OFDMA Cellular Networks Powered by the Smart Grid

Discontinuous transmission (DTX) is an efficient technology to improve the energy efficiency of the wireless cellular networks. DTX enables the deactivation of some components of the base station in sufficient short time, which can decrease the energy consumption without affecting the normal operation of the mobile networks. In addition, we consider distributed smart grid which can power the cellular networks using renewable and conventional energy. The distributed smart grid has many different energy retailers with variant energy resource, such as solar energy, wind energy, and conventional energy. Comparing with conventional energy, the renewable energy is more environmental friendly, but more expensive. As a result, it is necessary to obtain a good tradeoff between the operation cost and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. In this paper, we jointly optimize the DTX, resource allocation, and smart grid energy procurement to maximize the profit of the network operators and minimize the GHG emission. We formulate the joint optimization problem as a mixed integer programming problem. By exploiting the structure of the coupled constraint of the problem, we propose a suboptimal distributed algorithm based on the Lagrangian dual method, and the algorithm can be performed at cellular network and smart grid alternately, which can significantly decrease the signaling and computational overhead. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed DTX scheme can significantly enhance the energy saving, and further improve the energy efficiency of the cellular networks.