Spatial Traffic Shaping in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks with Energy Harvesting

LANGUAGE English

SOURCE IEEE Globecom 2015, Dec. 2015

Published Date:2015-12

ABSTRACT

Energy harvesting (EH), which explores renewable
energy as a supplementary power source, is a promising 5G
technology to support the huge energy demand of
heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs). However, the random
arrival of renewable energy brings new challenges to network
management. Through adjusting the distribution of traffic load
in spatial domain, traffic shaping helps to balance the cell-level
power demand and supply, enhancing the utilization of
renewable energy. In this paper, we investigate the power
saving performance of traffic shaping in an analytical way.
Specifically, an energy-optimal traffic shaping scheme (EOTS)
is devised for HCNs with EH, whereby the on-off state of the
off-grid small cell and the amount of offloading traffic are
adjusted dynamically, based on the statistic information of
energy arrival and traffic load. Numerical results are given,
which show that EOTS scheme can significantly reduce the
on-grid power consumption for the daily traffic and solar
energy profiles, compared with the greedy method where users
are always offloaded to the off-grid small cell with priority.