Energy harvesting small cell networks with full-duplex self-backhaul and massive MIMO

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at green small cell networks by jointly achieving self-backhaul and energy harvesting. We study full duplex (FD) technology and massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) technology to enhance the performance. In order to improve the energy efficiency (EE) further, we design a precoding scheme to eliminate the inter-tier interference. Moreover, we formulate the cell association and power allocation problem as an optimization problem to optimize the EE of the considered network with considering the energy arrival rate and remainder battery energy in SBSs. The formulated optimization problem implies a sleep mechanism to control the on/off of SBSs, which will reduce the energy consumption of small cell networks. Considering the high computation complexity for solving the non-convex optimization problem, we transform the original problem into a difference of convex program, which can be efficiently solved by using a constrained concave convex procedure based algorithm. Extensive simulations are conducted with different system configurations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.