GHetNet: A Framework Validating Green Mobile Femtocells in Smart‐Grids

Smart (power) grid infrastructure, from which the macrocellular networks get their essential electricity for functioning, is experiencing significant developments and rapid publicity nowadays. Macro base stations, which are key energy consumers in these networks, remain in operation even when there are very few users or no users at all. Accordingly, mobile femtocells are found to be potential green supplementary alternatives. This chapter presents an energy‐based analysis of femtocells in ultra‐large‐scale (
ULS
) applications such as the smart grid. The potential reduction of the consumed energy and service capacity due to mobility effects are considered as well as various performance metrics such as throughput, mean queue length, and response time. However, we focus mainly in this work on the departure feature of the mobile femtocell base‐station (
FBS
) with multiple communication interfaces, which has been ignored in the literature. In that sense the femtocells are modelled as green wireless communication systems considering
QoS
requirements as well as the
FBS
departures for energy‐saving and coverage aspects. A typical scenario is considered for smart grid applications as a case study where a set of mobile femtocells are utilized inside multiple macrocells, and quantitative measurement‐based simulation results have been presented. These results show the accuracy of the proposed
GHetNet
framework as an abstraction for a green femtocell system.