Energy Group-Buying with Loading Sharing for Green Cellular Networks

In the emerging hybrid electricity market, mobile network operators (MNOs) of cellular networks can make day-ahead energy purchase commitments at low prices and real-time flexible energy purchase at high prices. To minimize electricity bills, it is essential for MNOs to jointly optimize the day-ahead and real-time energy purchase based on their time-varying wireless traffic load. In this paper, we consider two different MNOs coexisting in the same area, and exploit their collaboration in both energy purchase and wireless load sharing for energy cost saving. Specifically, we propose a new approach named energy group buying with load sharing, in which the two MNOs are aggregated as a single group to make the day-ahead and real-time energy purchase, and their base stations (BSs) share the wireless traffic to maximally turn lightly-loaded BSs into sleep mode. When the two MNOs belong to the same entity and aim to minimize their total energy cost, we use the two-stage stochastic programming to obtain the optimal day-ahead and real-time energy group buying jointly with wireless load sharing. When the two MNOs belong to different entities and are self-interested in minimizing their individual energy costs, we propose a novel repeated Nash bargaining scheme for them to negotiate and share their energy costs under energy group buying and load sharing. Our proposed repeated Nash bargaining scheme is shown to achieve Pareto-optimal and fair energy cost reductions for both MNOs.