Renewable energy use in cellular networks

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate the use of renewable energy in wireless networks. This type of energy directly reduces the greenhouse gases emission and, in many cases, the operator energy costs. A large number of papers have been recently published about energy-efficient wireless networks issues. Some of them proposed analysis about the trade-offs of this new field. In this paper and, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, we introduce a new trade-off: between the user average satisfaction degree and the ratio of green (clean) renewable energy used in green wireless networks. A simple system model is described allowing us to obtain first results illustrating this trade-off. An intelligent battery-based system for a more efficient use of the renewable energy is included. The results show that for the model considered, only 25% of non-renewable energy guarantees more than 75% average user satisfaction