Power-Aware User Association and Renewable Energy Configuration for the Optimized On-Grid Energy in Hybrid-Energy Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Dense deployment of small base stations (SBSs) powered by on-grid and harvested renewable energy has been spotlighted as a promising solution to implement grid energy conservation in a hybrid-energy heterogeneous cellular network (HCN), which caters for the rapidly increasing demand of multimedia communication services. However, energy harvesting is inherently opportunistic, and battery leakage may deteriorate the network availability. In this article, we propose a power-aware user association and renewable energy configuration scheme for optimizing on-grid energy in HCN powered by hybrid energy with battery leakage. In this scheme, we present a power-aware user association rule that can get dynamically an availability set of SBS by predicting transmit power required by other users in each time slot (TS). Meanwhile, we exploit the Lyapunov optimization technique to control energy consumption of each user and design the heuristic algorithms to balance energy utilization for renewable energy configuration in different TSs. Numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme. It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes in optimizing the on-grid energy consumption.