Abstract

The carbon footprint of cellular base stations is continuously increasing, due to their large power consumption that accounts for more than 50 % of all of the cellular network infrastructure, and because of the large growth rate experienced by the cellular infrastructure. To address this problem, the work in this thesis investigates the feasibility of powering cellular base stations from harvested renewable energy. In addition, this work studies network architectures where the power consumed in the LTE macro base stations (called eNB) is reduced by integrating small-cells (e.g. micro, pico, and femto cells) into the LTE network, forming what is known as heterogeneous networks. Four different cellular network architectures are implemented: eNB-Micro, Micro only, eNB-Pico, and eNB-Femto. This work studies the performance of the architectures in terms of time operating from renewable energy, and the received signal quality improvement. Simulation results show that the implemented architectures operates from harvested renewable energy up to 93.9 % of the time for the case of the eNB-Femto architecture, and the probability of receiving SINR larger than 10 dB is increased from 0.25 (in the standard homogeneous LTE network) to up to 0.65 in the implemented architectures.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Cell phone systems--Environmental aspects; Long-Term Evolution (Telecommunications); Renewable energy sources

Publication Date

8-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Computer Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Computer Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Andres Kwasinski

Advisor/Committee Member

Shanchieh Yang

Advisor/Committee Member

Amlan Ganguly

Comments

Physical copy available from RIT's Wallace Library at TK5103.485 .Z34 2016

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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