Planning Solar in Energy-managed Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a joint planning model for solar energy installation and dynamic energy management in cellular networks, highlighting their interactions and the importance of integrated strategies for cost and performance optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model that captures the synergy between solar installation and energy management, demonstrating the need for joint planning in large cellular networks.

Findings

Joint planning improves cost efficiency and network performance.

The order of implementing solar and energy management affects outcomes.

Installing solar is not always optimal despite lower unit costs.

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 sys- tem composed of solar panels, batteries, charge con- trollers 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 intro- duced 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.