Since base stations are major consumers of cellular networks energy with significant contribution to operational expenditures, powering base stations sites using the energy of wind, sun, fuel cells or a combination gain mobile operators' attention.
How do base stations use energy?
Since base stations are major consumers of cellular networks energy with significant contribution to operational expenditures, powering base stations sites using the energy of wind, sun, fuel cells or a combination gain mobile operators' attention.
Do mobile network operators want to power remote base stations?
It is shown that mobile network operators express significant interest for powering remote base stations using renewable energy sources. This is because a significant percentage of remote base station sites on the global level are still diesel powered due to lack of connections to the electricity grid.
What are the components of a base station?
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 ).
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.
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.
How does a 3 kW BS system work?
In ( Hashimoto et al., 2003 ), a 3 kW BS at an island is powered by 7.6 kW PV panels and and 8 kW wind turbine with 177 KWh back up batteries. Their system comprises a wind generator and cylindrical photovoltaic modules that are mounted onto the wind generator pole to save installation space and cost.