Networked Energy Cooperation in Dual Powered Green Cellular Networks

Designing solar-enabled and power grid connected, ‘dual-powered’, cellular networks is challenging due to the double stochasticity arising from energy harvest and user traffic, resulting in spatio-temporally varying traffic-energy imbalances. Improper strategy to optimize the power grid connectivity results in generation of significant carbon footprint. In this paper, we present an analytical framework to mathematically capture the traffic-energy imbalances in such a dual-powered network and propose to improve the temporal network energy utilization by exploiting these imbalances through a cooperative energy sharing mechanism among the base stations (BSs), via the grid infrastructure itself. The cooperative communication system is designed and optimized independently from two perspectives, namely, grid energy procurement and carbon emission minimization (in carbon free ‘energy producer’ mode) and operator revenue maximization (in ‘energy prosumer’ mode). The energy producer mode involves the BSs, without the flexibility to procure energy and acting as distributed energy source to the power grid. The energy prosumer mode provides additional flexibility of grid energy procurement to the BSs in addition to energy sharing and selling. For a given capital expenditure (CAPEX), both the optimization problems are reformulated into convex quadratic problems and closed form expressions for the optimal quanta of energies to be shared/procured through/from the grid are obtained. The optimal CAPEX for the proposed modes of network operation are obtained via linear revenue maximization problem formulation. The results demonstrate that the proposed cooperative energy framework significantly improves the temporal network energy utilization, thereby reducing the grid energy procurement and providing significant revenue gains compared to the state-of-art.