Wireless communications powered by renewable energy sources have been emerging as a promising solution to mitigate the carbon footprints to achieve a green radio network. However, renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, are by nature unstable in their availability and capacity, which poses new challenges in the design and deployment of a sustainable communication network. The project will develop theoretical tools, propose new protocols and cross-layer optimization methods to enable an energy sustainable communication network. The multidisciplinary project will also foster the integration of research and education and provide both undergraduate and graduate students, particularly women and minority students, with an opportunity to participate in various training projects, which further inspire students to pursue high quality research with critical thinking.
In a renewable energy powered communication network, the fundamental design criterion and main performance metric have shifted from energy efficiency to energy sustainability, i.e., to ensure the harvested energy can sustain the user demands with satisfactory quality of service provisioning. In this project, a novel performance metric, the energy sustainability, is first formulated, based on which the energy sustainable performance of a communication system will be systematically analyzed, characterizing the dynamic energy charging and discharging processes. The analysis will be leveraged to investigate a series of fundamental research issues on sustainable communication and networking, including energy management, network deployment, admission control, adaptive resource allocation, and medium access control. Analytical tools in queueing theory, game theory, stochastic optimization, probability theory, and random processes will be used in the design, analysis, and optimization of the proposed algorithms and protocols to ensure energy sustainable operation of a wireless communication network. The research outcomes of the project have potential to be implemented in the next generation wireless communication network powered by renewable energy.
