Energy-Efficient Resource Optimization for Hybrid Energy Harvesting Massive MIMO Systems

In this article, we study resource optimization issues for hybrid energy harvesting massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where renewable energy harvested from surrounding environments is introduced as additional energy supply to the base station (BS) together with the grid power. Our purpose is to maximize system energy efficiency with the preferential use of renewable energy under several practical restrictions, such as limited battery capacity, energy causality, quality-of-service (QoS) requirement, and transmit power constraints. An offline policy is first presented under ideal assumptions, i.e., noncausal knowledge of the channel state information and energy harvesting dynamics are known in advance, which causes it to become a performance upper bound. In particular, the offline policy is designed in an iterative manner with the use of the fractional programming technique. Moreover, inspired by the offline policy, we exploit statistical information to present two practical online algorithms. Specifically, the Markov chain method predicts prospective information through use of the finite-state Markov model, whereas the timing detection scheme focuses only on the resource optimization of the current time slot. Numerical results illustrate that both online algorithms perform closely to the offline policy, which indicates that they can achieve a good tradeoff between performance and implementation complexity.