Microgrid for Radio Access Network Resilience

Greta Vallero, Michela Meo

Abstract: The consistent growth in electricity demand, cou-pled with factors such as political instability, cyberattacks, and the rising frequency of natural disasters due to the climate crisis, poses challenges to the reliability and consistency of the power grid supply. The malfunctioning of the power grid, in turn, has a cascading effect on the communication infrastructure, which heavily relies on the stability of the electricity grid. Despite this, enhancing the resilience of computing and communication facil-ities is fundamental. Their crucial role in supporting essential aspects of our daily lives requires ensuring their continuous and dependable operation. To cope with this, in this work, we view a group of Base Stations (BSs) of a Radio Access Network (RAN) as consumers within a Microgrid (MG), each equipped with a Photovoltaic (PV) Panel and interconnected through dedicated power cables to exchange their generated energy. We introduce a RAN resource and energy management, that, during a Power Grid Outage (PGO), aims at keeping active the most loaded BSs, given the available generated energy within the MG. We evaluate the impact of the number of BSs in the MG, the PV Panel capacity, the duration of the PGOs and the BS traffic shape profiles, formalizing also the required setting which guarantees the efficacy of our methodology. Results reveal that the performance achieved with PV Panels not exceeding 6 kWp is comparable to that of larger PV Panels (up to 12 kWp), if the MG and the RAN resource management are implemented, making our solution feasible in terms of installation space requirements and increasing the hourly served traffic up to 300%.