Real-time power balancing in green CoMP network with wireless information and energy transfer

Recently, equipping the base stations (BSs) with renewable energy harvesters for green communications has been considered as a promising technique to benefit both the environment and the retailer. However, the uneven distribution of renewable energy generation and the drastically increasing demand for mobile data has put forward the new challenge for the retailer. To tackle this problem, we propose a real-time base-station energy management (RBEM) strategy using renewable energy sources for green communications in coordinated multipoint networks with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer, where all the BSs collaborate to maintain the real-time supply and demand power balancing at the BSs, in order to reduce the overall energy cost of the retailer. The RBEM strategy is formulated as a non-convex linear combinational optimization problem to jointly minimize the energy consumption and energy trading, whilst accounting for the quality-of-service requirements for information receiving terminals and power transfer requirements for energy receiving terminals (ETs). Moreover, an iterative algorithm is proposed to determine the sources of energy harvested by the ETs. The original non-convex problem can be transformed into a numerically tractable form and solved using the semidefinite relaxation approach. Our simulation results confirm that the proposed RBEM strategy significantly reduces overall energy cost of the retailer.