Liquid cell management for reducing energy consumption expenses in hybrid energy powered cellular networks

To reduce the fossil energy consumption and the operational expenses, the hybrid energy powered cellular network (HybENet) with BSs powered by on-grid or renewable energy is studied. To minimize the total expenses of energy consumption (EEC) and guarantee the quality of service of HybENet, a liquid cell management algorithm, which adaptively and cooperatively adjusts the service coverage of BSs according to the actual load, is proposed. Specifically, the problem of minimizing the total EEC under constraints of the fluctuating arrivals of the renewable energy and the QoS is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. Then, we prove that the problem can be decomposed into two sub-problems: 1) the mean of per-link energy minimization problem, from which the closed expression of power allocation is derived; 2) the traffic block assignment problem, which is solved by ant colony optimization. Simulation results show that the total EEC can be effectively reduced.