Optimal energy management strategies in mobile networks powered by a smart grid

We focus in this paper on energy management strategies for mobile network, equipped with battery storage capacity as well as local energy production capability, and powered by a smart grid. At each time instant, the mobile network operator has to decide whether to operate its network based on its own energy resources or the smart grid ones, with a possibility to sell energy to the smart grid as well. We formulate our problem using Markov Decision Process (MDP) and derive an optimal policy, which minimizes the telecommunication operator energy bill, using dynamic programming algorithm. We show the optimally of our solution by numerical comparison with the case of being exclusively powered by the grid. Our numerical applications allow to further understand when the operator has an incentive to buy energy, whether it is beneficial for him to act as aggregator (energy seller) as well as the size of the battery to deploy.