Energy Harvesting Relay Node Deployment for Network Capacity Expansion

The increasing traffic demands in the past few years require further expansion of cellular network capacity. Densely deployed base stations may cause a large amount of energy consumption and lots of environmental problems. Relaying is considered as a promising cost-efficient solution for capacity expansion and energy saving due to the physical characteristics and low power requirements of the relay nodes. In this paper, we study the energy harvesting relay node deployment problem in a cellular network where the user distribution may change with time. We propose a greedy relay nodes deployment algorithm to satisfy the network capacity requirements in different time and put forward an operation optimization algorithm to make full use of renewable energy. Simulation results show that the network capacity can be increased significantly and the energy consumption can be reduced dramatically by the proposed algorithms.