Techno-Economic and Energy Efficiency Analysis of Optimal Power Supply Solutions for Green Cellular Base Stations

Abstract

The widespread proliferation of internet access, affordable wireless gadgets, the user data demand and the corresponding extended cellular networks entailing significant energy consumption and carbon footprints. With the added benefits of renewable energy harvesting (REH) technology, telecom base stations (BSs) are predominantly supplied by green power sources to reduce operational expenditure (OPEX) and atmospheric pollution with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). Accordingly, this paper examines the plausibility of optimal power supply solutions such as standalone solar photovoltaic (PV), hybrid PV/wind turbine (PV/WT), hybrid PV/diesel generator (DG) and hybrid PV/electric grid (PV/EG) to feed the Long Term Evolution (LTE) BSs pertaining to technical, economic and environmental aspects in Bangladesh. An extensive Monte-Carlo based simulations are performed to evaluate wireless network performance in terms of throughput, energy efficiency (EE), energy efficiency gain (EEgain), average energy savings, radio efficiency varying system bandwidth (B) and BS transmission power (PTX) considering the dynamic behavior of traffic intensity and renewable energy (RE) generation profile. By leveraging the cell zooming technique and a green traffic steering framework endeavors to minimize the net present cost and maximize the average energy savings as well. The simulation results reveal that the cell zooming technique attained energy savings yielding up to 36% and improvement of EEgain achieved about 23% with effective modeling of REH. Subsequently, a comprehensive comparison of the aforementioned schemes is pledged for further validation.

Keywords

• Green cellular networks
• renewable energy harvesting
• hybrid energy
• energy efficiency
• cell zooming
• eco-sustainability