CoMP Meets Smart Grid: A New Communication and Energy Cooperation Paradigm

Abstract

In this paper, we pursue a unified study on smart grid and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) enabled wireless communication by investigating a new joint communication and energy cooperation approach. We consider a practical CoMP system with clustered multiple-antenna base stations (BSs) cooperatively communicating with multiple single-antenna mobile terminals (MTs), where each BS is equipped with local renewable energy generators to supply power and also a smart meter to enable two-way energy flow with the grid. We propose a new energy cooperation paradigm, where a group of BSs dynamically share their renewable energy for more efficient operation via locally injecting/drawing power to/from an aggregator with a zero effective sum-energy exchanged. Under this new energy cooperation model, we consider the downlink transmission in one CoMP cluster with cooperative zero-forcing (ZF) based precoding at the BSs. We maximize the weighted sum-rate for all MTs by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocations at cooperative BSs and their exchanged energy amounts subject to a new type of power constraints featuring energy cooperation among BSs with practical loss ratios. Our new setup with BSs' energy cooperation generalizes the conventional CoMP transmit optimization under BSs' sum-power or individual-power constraints. It is shown that with energy cooperation, the optimal throughput is achieved when all BSs transmit with all of their available power, which is different from the conventional CoMP schemes without energy cooperation where BSs' individual power constraints may not be all tight at the same time. This result implies that some harvested energy may be wasted without any use in the conventional setup due to the lack of energy sharing among BSs, whereas the total energy harvested at all BSs is efficiently utilized for throughput maximization with the proposed energy cooperation, thus leading to a new energy cooperation gain. Finally, we validate our results by simulations under various practical setups, and show that the proposed joint communication and energy cooperation scheme substantially improves the downlink throughput of CoMP systems powered by smart grid and renewable energy, as compared to other suboptimal designs without communication and/or energy cooperation.

Mobile Energy Sharing Networks: Performance Analysis and Optimization

“…In return, the primary user can provide spectrum opportunity and supply energy to the secondary user. Additionally, there are other works related to energy sharing, e.g., [23]- [25] that can improve the energy efficiency and network performance.…”

Energy Cooperation for Sustainable Base Station Deployments: Principles and Algorithms

“…A two-dimensional and directional water-filling-based and offline algorithm is put forward to control the harvested energy flows in time and space (among users), with the objective of maximizing the system throughput for all the considered network configurations. In [12], the authors introduce a new entity called aggregator, which mediates between the grid operator and a group of BSs to redistribute the energy flows, reusing the existing power grid infrastructure: one BS injects power into the aggregator and, simultaneously, another one draws power from it. This solution does not consider the presence of energy storage devices, and for this reason some of the harvested energy can be lost if none of the base stations needs it at a certain time instant.…”

Fairness in multi-operator energy sharing

“…Energy sharing among elements of the same network has been studied in the past extensively in various forms: via power lines [7], via grid based on technical characteristics [8] or via aggregator-assisted energy transfer [9], [10]. Energy trading with the grid has also been presented as an easy energy and cost management solution, using criteria such as RE technical characteristics [11] or with an aggregator being used as an impartial entity [6].…”