  Self-powered, energy harvesting small cell base stations (SBS) are expected
to be an integral part of next-generation wireless networks. However, due to
uncertainties in harvested energy, it is necessary to adopt energy efficient
power control schemes to reduce an SBSs' energy consumption and thus ensure
quality-of-service (QoS) for users. Such energy-efficient design can also be
done via the use of content caching which reduces the usage of the
capacity-limited SBS backhaul. of popular content at SBS can also prove
beneficial in this regard by reducing the backhaul usage. In this paper, an
online energy efficient power control scheme is developed for an energy
harvesting SBS equipped with a wireless backhaul and local storage. In our
model, energy arrivals are assumed to be Poisson distributed and the popularity
distribution of requested content is modeled using Zipf's law. The power
control problem is formulated as a (discounted) infinite horizon dynamic
programming problem and solved numerically using the value iteration algorithm.
Using simulations, we provide valuable insights on the impact of energy
harvesting and caching on the energy and sum-throughput performance of the SBS
as the network size is varied. Our results also show that the size of cache and
energy harvesting equipment at the SBS can be traded off, while still meeting
the desired system performance.
