Greener and cheaper mobile communication: let the sunshine in

Considering the staggering increase of mobile traffic, Mobile Operators are facing huge operational cost due to power supply. Resource on Demand (RoD) strategies and renewable energy (RE) sources to power base stations (BSs) are widely adopted in Mobile Access Networks to reduce the energy consumption. Furthermore, the Smart Grid (SG) paradigm is deeply changing the energy market, envisioning an active interaction between the grid and its customers in a Demand Response (DR) framework. Hence, Mobile Operators can play a central role, by dynamically modulating their demand in accordance with SG requests, thus obtaining important electricity cost reductions. This work investigates critical issues raised by the introduction of RE to power BSs and proposes strategies to enhance the interaction with the SG, in order to make mobile networks more self-sustainable and reduce the energy bill. Stochastic models are deployed to reliably represent the location dependent RE production and the operation of a green mobile network, in order to investigate the RE system dimensioning and the green network performance under RoD strategies and energy management policies that improve the interaction with the SG. Results show that by properly combining the use of RE and RoD strategies with energy management policies, Mobile Operators can fully erase the energy bill and even gain positive revenues.