HAPS-Aided Power Grid Connected Green Communication Framework: Architecture and Optimization

Realizing energy sustainability is a key theme in sixth generation communications. Along with the emphasis on energy efficiency, operator revenue has emerged as a crucial aspect to make the networks scalable. In this paper, we propose a high altitude platform station (HAPS) aided and power grid connected green communication framework. To design green network, the proposed framework aims to offload excess users with the solar powered terrestrial macro base station (tMBS) to the HAPS mounted MBS (hMBS) in the event of high traffic or low energy harvest. The solar powered tMBS utilizes the power grid connectivity purely for energy selling rather than energy procurement. The inherent communication and energy networks in the proposed system are studied and modeled jointly as a six state discrete time Markov chain. The paper also provides analytical bounds on the solar provisioning required at the hMBS for radio access network functions. The proposed framework is compared with a without offloading and grid energy procurement based competitive state of art, in terms of network quality of service (QoS) and annual operator profit. Our simulation based performance studies demonstrate that the proposed framework under limited hMBS offloading capability offers gains compared to the competitive state of the art, up to 21% enhanced network QoS and 64% increased operator profit.