Robust Smart-Grid Powered Cooperative Multipoint Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust framework integrating renewable energy sources and smart grid features into beamforming for cooperative multi-point systems, optimizing energy cost while ensuring user quality of service.

Contribution

It introduces novel models for RES harvesting, storage, and dynamic pricing, and develops convex optimization-based robust energy management and beamforming strategies for CoMP systems.

Findings

Robust designs reduce energy costs under worst-case scenarios.

Convex optimization ensures efficient computation of strategies.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Abstract

A framework is introduced to integrate renewable energy sources (RES) and dynamic pricing capabilities of the smart grid into beamforming designs for coordinated multi-point (CoMP) downlink communication systems. To this end, novel models are put forth to account for harvesting, storage of nondispatchable RES, time-varying energy pricing, as well as stochastic wireless channels. Building on these models, robust energy management and transmit-beamforming designs are developed to minimize the worst-case energy cost subject to the worst-case user QoS guarantees for the CoMP downlink. Leveraging pertinent tools, this task is formulated as a convex problem. A Lagrange dual based subgradient iteration is then employed to find the desired optimal energy-management strategy and transmit-beamforming vectors. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the merits of the proposed robust designs.