This paper proposes an energy management framework for cellular heterogeneous networks (HetNets) supported by dynamic solar powered drones. A HetNet composed of a macrocell base station (BS), micro cell BSs, and drone small cell BSs are deployed to serve the networks’ subscribers. The drones can land at pre-planned locations defined by the mobile operator and at the macrocell BS site where they can charge their batteries. The objective of the framework is to jointly determine the optimal trips of the drones and the MBSs that can be safely turned off in order to minimize the total energy consumption of the network. This is done while considering the cells’ capacities and the minimum receiving power guaranteeing successful communications. To do so, an integer linear programming problem is formulated and optimally solved for three cases based on the knowledge level about future renewable energy statistics of the drones. A low complex relaxed solution is also developed. Its performances are shown to be close to those of the optimal solutions. However, the gap increases as the network becomes more congested. Numerical results investigate the performance of the proposed drone-based approach and show notable improvements in terms of energy saving and network capacity.

中文翻译：

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具有多个太阳能无人机的蜂窝 HetNet 的时空管理

本文提出了一种由动态太阳能无人机支持的蜂窝异构网络（HetNets）的能源管理框架。部署由宏小区基站 (BS)、微小区 BS 和无人机小小区 BS 组成的 HetNet 为网络用户提供服务。无人机可以降落在移动运营商定义的预先规划的位置和宏蜂窝基站站点，在那里它们可以为电池充电。该框架的目标是共同确定可以安全关闭的无人机和 MBS 的最佳行程，以最小化网络的总能耗。这是在考虑单元容量和保证成功通信的最小接收功率的同时完成的。为此，基于无人机未来可再生能源统计的知识水平，针对三种情况制定并优化解决整数线性规划问题。还开发了一种低复杂度的松弛解决方案。它的性能被证明接近最优解的性能。但是，随着网络变得更加拥挤，差距会增加。数值结果调查了所提出的基于无人机的方法的性能，并在节能和网络容量方面显示出显着的改进。