The Hybrid Solar-RF Energy for Base Transceiver Stations

Abstract

The base transceiver stations (BTS) are telecom infrastructures that facilitate wireless communication between the subscriber device and the telecom operator networks. They are deployed in suitable places having a lot of freely propagating ambient radio frequency (RF) and solar energies. This paper is aimed at converting received ambient environmental energy into usable electricity to power the stations. We proposed a hybrid energy harvesting system that can collect energy from RF and solar energies at the same time. The sources are combined to provide to a significant amount, to contribute to operational expenditures that reduce energy costs, and to improve the energy efficiency of the base station sites in rural areas from the most common renewable resources since the base stations are major consumers of cellular networks. The hybrid systems are designed with circuits, simulated, and compared to show their good performance to the base stations. PSIM, PROTEUS, and MATLAB software are used to simulate for evaluating the voltage and the current output of the hybrid systems that meet the power requirements. The design and simulation results show the feasibility of our proposed method with the battery storage that can be deployed not only in real base stations but also for other electrical operated systems.