Energy Sharing based Cooperative Dual-powered Green Cellular Networks

Solar enabled and grid connected 'dual-powered' base stations (BSs) have developed as a cost effective solution to network operators. While these networks prevent energy outages and are effective in providing seamless operation for catering to the user quality of service (QoS), they still rely significantly on the power-grid, generating carbon footprint. In this paper, we propose a profitable energy sharing based cooperative framework to reduce the grid energy consumption and to facilitate better utilization of network energy. Traffic-energy imbalances in a dual-powered network often result in some BSs being energy deficient due to spatio-temporal variation of traffic. In such an event, it is proposed that the energy deficient BS, through the proposed energy cooperation (EC) framework, interact with the other networked BSs and requests them to share the deficient energy or a portion of it at a much lower price than the grid price via grid itself. We compare the proposed EC model with a without energy cooperation (WEC) model, where the BSs do not interact with one another and release energy above their storage capacity only to the power-grid for selling. Our results demonstrate that for a two BS network, the EC model provides a significant reduction in grid consumption up to 50% with a 38% gain in operator's revenue at 80% traffic skewness.