Green Cognitive Mobile Networks With Small Cells for Multimedia Communications in the Smart Grid Environment

High-data-rate mobile multimedia applications can greatly increase energy consumption, leading to an emerging trend of addressing the “energy efficiency” aspect of mobile networks. Cognitive mobile networks with small cells are important techniques for meeting the high-data-rate requirements and improving the energy efficiency of mobile multimedia communications. However, most existing works do not consider the power grid, which provides electricity to mobile networks. Currently, the power grid is experiencing a significant shift from the traditional grid to the smart grid. In the smart grid environment, only considering energy efficiency may not be sufficient since the dynamics of the smart grid will have significant impacts on mobile networks. In this paper, we study green cognitive mobile networks with small cells in the smart grid environment. Unlike most existing studies on cognitive networks, where only the radio spectrum is sensed, our cognitive networks sense not only the radio spectrum environment but also the smart grid environment, based on which power allocation and interference management for multimedia communications are performed. We formulate the problems of electricity price decision, energy-efficient power allocation, and interference management as a three-stage Stackelberg game. A homogeneous Bertrand game with asymmetric costs is used to model price decisions made by the electricity retailers. A backward induction method is used to analyze the proposed Stackelberg game. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly reduce operational expenditure and CO₂ emissions in cognitive mobile networks with small cells for multimedia communications.