Microgrids for Base Stations: Increased Cellular Network Resiliency through Integration of Solar Energy and Virtual Energy Transfer

Batteries banks or photovoltaic (PV) arrays can increase cellular cell sites resiliency to disruptions in the electricity supply from the local utility, but their deployment is challenging in small cell sites due to size limitations on the power backup components. This work presents a novel approach to leverage PV arrays at large cell sites, where small cells increase their resiliency by receiving a virtual energy transfer (VET) from a macro cell that is equipped with a PV array. Also, this work is the first to evaluate the performance of VET under dynamic load conditions. The results show that VET provides useful increases in resiliency for small cells, yielding an energy buffer autonomy increase of at least 14% (in the least favorable setup), while even a modest-size PV array allows the macro BS to provide VET without any sacrifice in its resiliency.