Demand Shaping to Achieve Steady Electricity Consumption with Load Balancing in a Smart Grid

The purpose of this paper is to study conflicting objectives between the grid operator and consumers in a future smart grid. Traditionally, customers in electricity grids have different demand profiles and it is generally assumed that the grid has to match and satisfy the demand profiles of all its users. However, for system operators and electricity producers, it is usually most desirable, convenient and cost effective to keep electricity production at a constant rate. The temporal variability of electricity demand forces power generators, especially load following and peaking plants to constantly manipulate electricity production away from a steady operating point

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Communication

The adoption of a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) for downlink multi-user communication from a multi-antenna base station is investigated in this paper. We develop energy-efficient designs for both the transmit power allocation and the phase shifts of the surface reflecting elements, subject to individual link budget guarantees for the mobile users. This leads to non-convex design optimization problems for which to tackle we propose two computationally affordable approaches, capitalizing on alternating maximization, gradient descent search, and sequential fractional programming. Specifically, one algorithm employs gradient descent for obtaining the RIS phase coefficients, and fractional programming for optimal transmit power allocation. Instead, the second algorithm employs sequential fractional programming for the optimization of the RIS phase shifts. In addition, a realistic power consumption model for RIS-based systems is presented, and the performance of the proposed methods is analyzed in a realistic outdoor environment. In particular, our results show that the proposed RIS-based resource allocation methods are able to provide up to $300\%$ higher energy efficiency, in comparison with the use of regular multi-antenna amplify-and-forward relaying.Comment: Accepted by IEEE TWC; additional materials on the topic are included in the 2018 conference publications at ICASSP (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8461496) and GLOBECOM 2018 (arXiv:1809.05397

Outage Probability of Dual-Hop Multiple Antenna AF Relaying Systems with Interference

This paper presents an analytical investigation on the outage performance of dual-hop multiple antenna amplify-and-forward relaying systems in the presence of interference. For both the fixed-gain and variable-gain relaying schemes, exact analytical expressions for the outage probability of the systems are derived. Moreover, simple outage probability approximations at the high signal to noise ratio regime are provided, and the diversity order achieved by the systems are characterized. Our results suggest that variable-gain relaying systems always outperform the corresponding fixed-gain relaying systems. In addition, the fixed-gain relaying schemes only achieve diversity order of one, while the achievable diversity order of the variable-gain relaying scheme depends on the location of the multiple antennas.Comment: Accepted to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication