Cost-Aware Green Cellular Networks with Energy and Communication Cooperation

Energy cost of cellular networks is ever-increasing to match the surge of wireless data traffic, and the saving of this cost is important to reduce the operational expenditure (OPEX) of wireless operators in future. The recent advancements of renewable energy integration and two-way energy flow in smart grid provide potential new solutions to save the cost. However, they also impose challenges, especially on how to use the stochastically and spatially distributed renewable energy harvested at cellular base stations (BSs) to reliably supply time- and space-varying wireless traffic over cellular networks. To overcome these challenges, in this article we present three approaches, namely, {\emph{energy cooperation, communication cooperation, and joint energy and communication cooperation}}, in which different BSs bidirectionally trade or share energy via the aggregator in smart grid, and/or share wireless resources and shift loads with each other to reduce the total energy cost.Comment: Submitted for possible publicatio

Connectivity analysis in clustered wireless sensor networks powered by solar energy

©2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Emerging 5G communication paradigms, such as machine-type communication, have triggered an explosion in ad-hoc applications that require connectivity among the nodes of wireless networks. Ensuring a reliable network operation under fading conditions is not straightforward, as the transmission schemes and the network topology, i.e., uniform or clustered deployments, affect the performance and should be taken into account. Moreover, as the number of nodes increases, exploiting natural energy sources and wireless energy harvesting (WEH) could be the key to the elimination of maintenance costs while also boosting immensely the network lifetime. In this way, zero-energy wireless-powered sensor networks (WPSNs) could be achieved, if all components are powered by green sources. Hence, designing accurate mathematical models that capture the network behavior under these circumstances is necessary to provide a deeper comprehension of such networks. In this paper, we provide an analytical model for the connectivity in a large-scale zero-energy clustered WPSN under two common transmission schemes, namely, unicast and broadcast. The sensors are WEH-enabled, while the network components are solar-powered and employ a novel energy allocation algorithm. In our results, we evaluate the tradeoffs among the various scenarios via extensive simulations and identify the conditions that yield a fully connected zero-energy WPSN.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft