1 Power Management for Wireless Base Station in Smart Grid Environment: Modeling and Optimization

The overall contribution of cellular network operators to the entire human CO2 emissions is estimated at 2.5% in the U.S. [1]. Thereinto, about 60%− 80% originates from wireless base stations (BSs) [7]. As current cellular network architectures are designed to cope with peak load and degraded conditions, underutilization of them occurs most of the time. A recent study [70] shows that the average power consumption of the traditional BS amounts to nearly 850W , with only up to 40W power consumed to transmit from the antennas and the rest wasted even during idle operation. This result indicates that there is a large room for power savings for nowaday’s cellular network. In this chapter, we consider the problem of power management for wireless BS with renewable power source in smart grid environment. In Section 1.1, we first provide an introduction of green wireless communications with the focus on two closely related research fields, i.e., renewable power source and smart grid. Then, we provide an overview on the power management approaches of wireless BS, which consists of two major directions, i.e., BS power control and smart BS operation. The former is achieved at equipment level, while the latter can be realized at system/network level. Afterwards, we discuss about some challenges and open issues with regard to power management for BS. In Section 1.2, we present the power consumption model of wireless BS. Specifically, power consuming components are first introduced and analyzed. Moreover, we present two power consumption models, one for macro BSs which contains a static power consumption part only, and the other for micro BS which additionally consists of a dynamic power consumption part. The power consumption models of macro BS and micro BS allow to characterize, quantify and compare different deployment strategies when realistic input parameters are available. In Section 1.3, we propose an adaptive power management approach for wireless BS with a renewable power source in smart grid environment. While the main