Energy-cost aware off-grid base stations with IoT devices for developing a green heterogeneous network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a renewable energy-powered off-grid HetNet architecture with innovative energy sharing and scheduling algorithms, significantly improving energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and environmental sustainability for rural IoT deployments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel renewable energy-based power supply architecture with energy sharing, and a weighted proportional-fair resource scheduling algorithm for off-grid HetNets with IoT devices.

Findings

Energy-efficient and cost-effective system architecture.

Enhanced battery lifetime for IoT devices.

Validated performance through simulations and optimization tools.

Abstract

Heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a specified cellular platform to tackle the rapidly growing anticipated data traffic. From communications perspective, data loads can be mapped to energy loads that are generally placed on the operator networks. Meanwhile, renewable energy aided networks offer to curtail fossil fuel consumption, so to reduce environmental pollution. This paper proposes a renewable energy based power supply architecture for off-grid HetNet using a novel energy sharing model. Solar photovoltaic (PV) along with sufficient energy storage devices are used for each macro, micro, pico, or femto base station (BS). Additionally, biomass generator (BG) is used for macro and micro BSs. The collocated macro and micro BSs are connected through end-to-end resistive lines. A novel weighted proportional-fair resource-scheduling algorithm with sleep mechanisms is proposed for non-real time (NRT) applications by trading-off the power consumption and communication delays. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm with extended discontinuous reception (eDRX) and power saving mode (PSM) for narrowband internet of things (IoT) applications extends battery lifetime for IoT devices. HOMER optimization software is used to perform optimal system architecture, economic, and carbon footprint analyses while Monte-Carlo simulation tool is used for evaluating the throughput and energy efficiency performances. The proposed algorithms are valid for the practical data of the rural areas. We demonstrate the proposed power supply architecture is energy-efficient, cost-effective, reliable, and eco-friendly.