Energy harvesting based green heterogeneous wireless access for 5G

Abstract

A worldwide challenge for the design of future cellular systems is to meet the increasing energy demand, while, on the other hand, to lower the emission of greenhouse gases for achieving the environment sustainability. Afeasible and efficient method to tackle this issue is to let the communication systems harvest energy from renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels. However, by employing the energy harvesting (EH) technique, the instability of renewable energy resources introduce new challenges on the design of the upcoming 5G systems. In this chapter, we focus on uplink access schemes and power allocations for EH based heterogeneous networks. First, a heterogeneous access model incorporating EH based mobile users is proposed and followed by a throughput maximization framework. Then, by classifying transmission policies into two main categories (i.e., single-channel vs. multi-channel scenarios), the proposed framework is concretized under various practical conditions, including the availability of central control, causality of harvested energy, channel state information, and others. Finally, future research directions and open problems are discussed.