Fair Sharing of Backup Power Supply in Multi-Operator Wireless Cellular Towers

Keeping wireless base stations operating continually and providing uninterrupted communications services can save billions of dollars as well as human lives during natural disasters and/or electricity outages. Toward this end, wireless operators need to install backup power supplies whose capacity is sufficient to support their peak power demand, thus incurring a significant capital expense. Hence, pooling together backup power supplies and sharing it among co-located wireless operators can effectively reduce the capital expense, as the backup power capacity can be sized based on the aggregate demand of co-located operators instead of individual demand. Turning this vision into reality, however, faces a new challenge: how to fairly share the backup power supply? In this paper, we propose fair sharing of backup power supply by multiple wireless operators based on the Nash bargaining solution (NBS). In addition, we integrate our analysis with multiple time slots for emergency cases in which the study the backup energy sharing based on model predictive control and NBS subject to an energy capacity constraint regarding future service availability. Our simulations demonstrate that sharing backup power/energy improves the communications service quality with lower cost and consumes less base station power than the non-sharing approach.