Sharing renewable energy in a network sharing context

Abstract

This paper studies the performance gains resulting from the sharing of energy and network resources in the case of co-located base stations of different mobile network operators, powered by photovoltaic panels, and equipped with energy storage. Three configurations are considered for base station cooperation. The first one assumes two non-cooperating base stations, each one exploiting its own power system and serving its own customers, hence with no sharing. The second considers a shared power system, but no cooperation in customer service. The third looks at cooperation in both energy production and service provisioning, since only one base station handles all customers when traffic is low. Using an analytical modeling framework, we compute performance metrics for the three cases, and we show that significant gains are possible in the case of energy and network sharing.