Emission-Aware Sustainable Energy Provision for 5G and B5G Mobile Networks

A massive number of small cell base stations are expected to be deployed in the 5G and beyond 5G mobile communication networks due to the exponential increase in mobile traffic. This will directly lead to not only a significant increase in energy consumption but also the overall operational cost and carbon footprint. An energy provision based on renewable energy generation to power these small cell base stations is considered a sustainable and promising solution to address this challenge. This paper exploits the cost-effective and low-carbon energy provision solution for individual small-cell mobile networks and presents two different potential frameworks, i.e., centralized and distributed energy provision, respectively. The former supplies nearby small cell base stations through a centralized renewable energy source with energy storage facilities. For the latter, small cell base stations can be supplied by utilizing local renewable energy and storage facilities. These two frameworks are assessed and compared in terms of renewable energy utilization and carbon emission reduction in the presence of time-varying traffic loads, small cell locations and renewable energy availabilities. In addition, we devise energy management for these configurations by incorporating a resource-on-demand strategy in the proposed framework. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed centralized renewable energy generation strategy for nearby small cells maximizes the cost and energy efficiencies of the network.