Architecture for green mobile network powered from renewable energy in microgrid configuration

This paper introduces an architecture for powering green mobile networks with a majority of renewable sources. The architecture makes use of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels as sources of electric power for cellular base stations. The electric power generators are located within the cellular network in a microgrid configuration. The microgrid configuration allows for a more efficient management of electric resources and a more resilient cellular system architecture. In addition, the microgid configuration allows for a management of the cellular network resources more tightly coupled with the electric power grid status and viceversa. The presented results will show that it is possible to power a cellular network from renewable source for us much as 90 % of the time. This work also discussed traffic shaping and management techniques so as to power off one cell to increase the use of renewable energy sources even when the traffic is not at a low level. The technique is effective in maintaining within reasonable values the reduction of voice traffic quality and the increasing in data queuing delay.