Energy-aware resource allocation with energy harvesting in heterogeneous wireless network

Energy harvesting is becoming a promising technology for future wireless communication network for its potential of saving nonrenewable energy and making the communication environmentally friendly. However, due to the unpredictable and intermittent nature of energy source, the road to the communication system powered solely by harvested energy is plagued with potholes. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous network consisting of one macro base station (BS) powered with power grid and one small BS powered by both harvested and grid energy over a given time period (e.g. 24 hours), using statistical information of harvested energy. Then we study the resource allocation problem to minimize the power grid input while satisfying users' quality of service (outage probability) requirements, where dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is proposed to analyze the outage probability and solve the problem. The simulation results show that the DP algorithm can greatly reduce the grid power consumption compared with current heuristic methods. There is also an interesting observation of our results that the amount of harvested energy have no impact on the optimum resource allocation strategies.