Resource Allocation for Energy Harvesting Enabled Phantom Cellular Networks

Abstract

Phantom cellular networks are the key enabling technology that can increase the capacity of cellular networks by adding a new data plane to an exist ing macrocell control plane. Deployment of conventional two-tier phantom cellular networks results in an increase in overall power consumption of cel lular systems. In this work, we evaluate the performance of sustainable phantom cellular networks to reduce the overall power consumption. The Phantom Base Stations (PBSs) are enabled with Energy Harvesting (EH) from renewable energy resources. Addition of Phantom cells in the network provides with a capacity gain of 1.25 times over the conventional macro cel lular network. This gain can be further enhanced by up to 2.6 times by using interference free PBSs (mitigating interference). Moreover, this work presents a performance comparison of Round Robin (RR) and Proportional Fairness (PF) in terms of capacity and energy efficiency (EE). The perfor mance of Energy Harvesting (EH) enabled phantom cells operating under a macrocell is analyzed in terms of capacity and energy efficiency. The Phan tom Base Stations (PBSs) provide capacity gains by offloading users from Macro Base Station (MBS). However, due to the reuse of the same resource blocks by all PBSs, severe co-channel interference exists between PBSs, which limits the capacity gains. Furthermore, an excessive amount of energy is con sumed by the PBSs to overcome this co-channel interference. To minimize x the above mentioned capacity limiting problem of co-channel interference and energy consumption, semi-static ON/OFF switching schemes are evalu ated. Interference Aware (IA),Traffic Aware (TA) and capacity Maximising (CMS) ON/OFF switching schemes are compared with Random ON/OFF and macrocell only schemes. Simulation results show that when the num bers of offloaded users are high, the CMS scheme performs better in terms of capacity, with energy savings upto 64%. For both the IA and TA switching schemes, the gains are dependent on user distribution within the network and independent for CMS scheme. Finally, the use of renewable energy to power PBS can reduce carbon CO2 emission and will make our environment clean