Planning Solar in Energy-Managed Cellular Networks

Abstract

There has been a lot of interest recently on the energy efficiency and environmental impact of wireless networks. Given that the base stations are the network elements that use most of this energy, much research has dealt with ways to reduce the energy used by the base stations by turning them off during periods of low load.In addition to this, installing a solar harvesting system composed of solar panels, batteries, charge controllers and inverters is another way to further reduce the network environmental impact and some research has been dealing with this for individual base stations.In this paper, we show that both techniques are tightly coupled. We propose a mathematical model that captures the synergy between solar installation over a network and the dynamic operation of energy-managed base stations. We study the interactions between the two methods for networks of hundreds of base stations and show that the order in which each method is introduced into the system does make a difference in terms of cost and performance. We also show that installing solar is not always the best solution even when the unit cost of the solar energy is smaller than the grid cost. We conclude that planning the solar installation and energy management of the base stations have to be done jointly.Index Terms-Cellular networks, energy management, sleep mode, solar power arXiv:1809.07835v1 [cs.NI]

Online Supervisory Control and Resource Management for Energy Harvesting BS Sites Empowered with Computation Capabilities

“…The authors propose two algorithms: the first decides which BSs are to be active based on the minimum energy cost, i.e., the energy price per time period, while the second one determines the active BSs by first prioritizing the minimum power consumption of the system, and then the energy cost. The relationship between installing a solar harvesting system to power a BS and the energy management under varying demand is investigated in [22]. The authors present a solar installation planning model by explicitly modelling solar panels, batteries, inverters and charge controllers, as well as the cellular network demand and energy management.…”