Energy efficiency of JT CoMP based green powered LTE-A cellular networks

Energy efficiency (EE) is of paramount importance for future cellular networks due to ever increasing energy consumption. Powering radio access network with green energy promises a potential reduction of network operating cost and carbon footprints while maintaining the quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we propose a novel network model for the downlink LTE-A cellular networks with hybrid power supplies. The considered network deploys BSs having individual energy storages and on-site green energy harvester such as solar panel. Under the proposed model, joint transmission (JT) CoMP transmission technique is applied for selecting the best serving BSs for user equipment (UE). Our aim is to investigate the potential of SINR based JT CoMP and distanced based JT CoMP on the proposed hybrid model and quantify their individual contributions considering stochastic behavior of traffic demand profile. Extensive simulations are carried out for evaluating the energy consumption gain (ECG), energy reduction gain (ERG) and EE performance of the proposed model under a wide range of network scenarios. Results demonstrate that a significant enhancement in on-grid energy savings for a prolonged period of time can be achieved.