Renewable energy aware cluster formation for CoMP transmission in green cellular networks

The increasing severity of the inter-cell interference problem due to universal frequency reuse has prompted many research studies on coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission. In addition to the enhancement of the received signal strength, CoMP transmission can be performed in an energy-efficient manner. However, existing works on CoMP transmission do not investigate the potentials of energy saving with the incorporation of renewable energy. In this paper, we formulate a renewable energy aware cluster formation (REAL) problem to minimize the energy consumption in electric grid, with the support of hybrid energy supply in each cell site. Due to the difficulties in solving the REAL problem, we propose to decompose it into two stages and design polynomial-time algorithms for the decomposed problems. In our simulation results, we show the achieved SINR by the harvested energy in cluster formation. Then, we demonstrate that our proposed solution can better utilize the harvested energy and effectively save the energy consumption in electric grid.