Cooperative Scheme for Efficient Communication using Renewable-Powered Base Stations

In this paper, we introduce an energy efficient communication architecture that encourages the use of renewable energy through exchange of power and dynamic access. The base stations (BSs) are often equipped with renewable energy generators, but the random availability of this energy combined with the users' demand heterogeneity, make the use of this energy inefficient. Thus, we propose to improve it through cooperation between BSs by (i) exchanging the energy among them, and (ii) dynamically assigning users and available resources. We formulate an optimization problem that maximizes a generic objective function combining the users satisfaction and the network energy consumption cost. The different degrees of freedom in the system, ranging from assignment of users to BSs, exchange of available energy, and dynamic allocation of the bandwidth are considered while the budget power and bandwidth constraints are taken into account. We show that the optimization problem can be written as a mixed-integer linear problem (MILP). Simulation results confirm the important savings in non-renewable power consumption and enhanced throughput that can be reached using the proposed collaborative scheme, despite the exchange power losses.