Can small businesses invest in communication base station energy management systems

This paper aims to consolidate the work carried out in making base station (BS) green and energy efficient by integrating renewable energy sources (RES). Clean and green technologies are mandatory for reduction of carbon footprint in future cellular networks.

A typical base station consists of different sub-systems which can consume energy as shown in Fig. 4. These sub-systems include baseband (BB) processors, transceiver (TRX) (comprising power amplifier (PA), RF transmitter and receiver), feeder cable and antennas, and air conditioner ( Ambrosy et al., 2011 ).

The radio resources can be manipulated to conserve energy by adapting the capacity and/or converge of the green BS. This is demonstrated in ( Valerdi et al., 2010 ), where both aspects are optimized according to the available renewable energy and battery back-up available.

Their energy storage algorithm controlling the battery bank's SoC is shown to sustain the BS load by effectively managing the solar in a stand alone power system.

The authors of ( Li et al., 2011a) estimate that such BS cooperation can save as much as 85% of the total energy consumed during off-peak hours in dense urban areas, which is considered 35% over and above the savings operators would make if they acted on their own.

Energy resource management involve schemes such as energy cooperation and optimization of different energy sources ( Oh et al., 2013 ). Multi-radio access network technologies (Multi-RAT) management and novel paradigms for delay tolerant services are also some resource management techniques.