Dynamic Cross-Layer Beamforming in Hybrid Powered Communication Systems With Harvest-Use-Trade Strategy

The application of renewable energy is a promising solution to realize the Green Communications. However, if the cellular systems are solely powered by the renewable energy, the weather dependence of the renewable energy arrival makes the systems unstable. On the other hand, the proliferation of the smart grid facilitates the loads with two-way energy trading capability. Hence, a hybrid powered cellular system, which combines the smart grid with the base stations, can reduce the grid energy expenditure and improve the utilization efficiency of the renewable energy. In this paper, the long-term grid energy expenditure minimization problem is formulated as a stochastic optimization model. By leveraging the stochastic optimization theory, we reformulate the stochastic optimization problem as a \mbox{per-frame} grid energy plus weighted penalized packet rate minimization problem, which is NP-hard. As a result, two suboptimal algorithms, which jointly consider the effects of the channel quality and the packet reception failure, are proposed based on the successive approximation beamforming (SABF) technique and the \mbox{zero-forcing} beamforming (ZFBF) technique. The convergence properties of the proposed suboptimal algorithms are established, and the corresponding computational complexities are analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed SABF algorithm outperforms the ZFBF algorithm in both grid energy expenditure and packet delay. By tuning a control parameter, the grid energy expenditure can be traded for the packet delay under the proposed stochastic optimization model.Comment: accepted by IEEE Trans. Wireless Commu

Networked MIMO with Fractional Joint Transmission in Energy Harvesting Systems

This paper considers two base stations (BSs) powered by renewable energy serving two users cooperatively. With different BS energy arrival rates, a fractional joint transmission (JT) strategy is proposed, which divides each transmission frame into two subframes. In the first subframe, one BS keeps silent to store energy while the other transmits data, and then they perform zero-forcing JT (ZF-JT) in the second subframe. We consider the average sum-rate maximization problem by optimizing the energy allocation and the time fraction of ZF-JT in two steps. Firstly, the sum-rate maximization for given energy budget in each frame is analyzed. We prove that the optimal transmit power can be derived in closed-form, and the optimal time fraction can be found via bi-section search. Secondly, approximate dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is introduced to determine the energy allocation among frames. We adopt a linear approximation with the features associated with system states, and determine the weights of features by simulation. We also operate the approximation several times with random initial policy, named as policy exploration, to broaden the policy search range. Numerical results show that the proposed fractional JT greatly improves the performance. Also, appropriate policy exploration is shown to perform close to the optimal.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Communication