Energy agile packet scheduling to leverage green energy for next generation cellular networks

Green communications has received much attention recently. Utilizing green energy in wireless cellular networks is promising to reduce the main grid electricity consumption, and thus to reduce the CO₂ footprint. However, owing to the fluctuating nature of green energy, it is challenging to use green energy in cellular networks. In this paper, we propose an energy agile packet scheduler which maximizes the utilization of green energy by optimizing the packet scheduling. The packet scheduling optimization problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. The energy agile scheduler approximates the optimal packet scheduling solution in two steps. First, the energy agile scheduler balances the BS's energy consumption in transmitting packets among time slots. Second, within each time slot, the energy agile scheduler optimizes the bandwidth allocations to minimize the BS's energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed energy agile scheduler achieves significant main grid energy savings.