Power Outage Estimation and Resource Dimensioning for Solar Powered Cellular Base Stations

One of the major issues in the deployment of solar powered base stations (BSs) is to dimension the photovoltaic (PV) panel and battery size resources, while satisfying outage constraints with least cost. The fundamental step in this dimensioning is to evaluate the power outage probability associated with a particular configuration of PV panel and battery size. This paper addresses this issue by first proposing an analytic model to evaluate the power outage probability of a solar powered BS. The proposed model accounts for hourly as well as daily variation in the harvested solar energy as well as the load dependent BS power consumption. The model evaluates the steady state probability of the battery level, which is then used to estimate the BS power outage probability. Next, given a tolerable power outage probability, we address the problem of obtaining the cost-optimal PV panel and battery dimensions for the BS. The proposed model and the framework have been evaluated using empirical solar energy data for geographically diverse locations.