Near optimal online resource allocation scheme for energy harvesting cloud radio access network with battery imperfections

Abstract

In energy harvesting wireless networks, the energy storage devices are usually imperfect. In this paper, we investigate dynamic online resource allocation scheme for Energy Harvesting Cloud Radio Access Network (EH-CRAN) by jointly considering the EH process, data admission, and a practical battery model with finite battery capacity, energy charging and discharging loss. We use Lyapunov optimization technique and design data queue and energy queue to formulate a stochastic optimization problem, and decompose the formulated problem into three subproblems, including data scheduling, power allocation and routing scheduling. Based on the solutions of these subproblems, an online resource allocation algorithm is proposed to maximize the user utility while ensuring the sustainability of RRHs. Furthermore, this algorithm does not require any prior statistical information of the system, e.g., channel state, data arrival and EH process. Both performance analysis and simulation results demonstrate the proposed algorithm can achieve close-to-optimal utility.