Coverage of renewable powered cellular networks

Abstract

Powering a radio access network using renewables such as wind and solar power promises dramatic reduction of the network operation cost and of the networks' carbon footprints. However, the spatial variation of the energy field can lead to fluctuation in power supplied to the network and thereby affects its coverage. To quantify the effect, the paper considers a cellular downlink network with hexagonal cells and powered by harvesting energy. The network coverage of mobiles is specified by an outage constraint. A novel model of the energy field is developed using stochastic geometry. In the model, fixed maximum energy intensity occurs at Poisson distributed locations, called energy centers; the intensities fall off from the centers following an exponential-decay function of squared distance; the energy intensity at an arbitrary location is given by the decayed intensity from the nearest energy center. First, consider single harvesters deployed on the same sites as base stations (BSs). The mobile outage probability is shown to decrease exponentially with the product of the energy-field parameters: the energy-center density and exponential rate of the energy-decay function. Next, consider distributed harvesters whose generated energy is aggregated and then re-distributed to BSs. As the number of harvesters per aggregator increases, the power supplied to each BS is shown to converge to a constant proportional to the number of harvesters per BS, which counteracts the randomness of the energy field. © 2014 IEEE.