A Stackelberg Game Approach for Energy Outage-Aware Power Distribution of an Off-Grid Base Station over Multiple Retailers

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of power distribution for an off-grid base station (BS) that operates sustainably without an electrical grid. We consider that multiple retailers with heterogeneous renewable energy sources (RESs) compete to maximize their revenues by individually setting the unit power price. Energy outages (EOs), which cause the power supply to fall below that which is sufficient for ensuring the traffic arrival rate required for the off-grid BS, critically affect the users' service quality. To minimize EOs and operational expenditure (OPEX), the off-grid BS manages the power supply by reacting to the retailers' pricing decisions. We analyze the economic benefits of power distribution to the off-grid BS from the perspective of the retailers' pricing competition, by designing a hierarchical decision-making scheme as a multi-leader single-follower Stackelberg game. We derive a closed form expression for the optimal behavior of the off-grid BS and retailers, based on well-designed utility functions. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the proposed solution with its practical convergence time.