Energy‐efficient opportunistic forwarding in multi‐hop cellular networks using device‐to‐device communications
Baldomero Coll-Perales, Javier Gozálvez, Vasilis Friderikos · Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies · 2014
Abstract Cellular networks face significant capacity, efficiency and quality challenges because of the exponential growth of cellular data traffic. Multi‐hop cellular networks (MCNs) have been proposed to address these challenges through the integration of cellular and device‐to‐device communications. This work investigates how the adoption and design of opportunistic store, carry and forward mechanisms in MCNs can help importantly decrease the energy consumption for delay tolerant traffic. To this aim, the study first derives an analytical framework to identify in two‐hop scenarios the optimum mobile relay location and the location from which the mobile relay should start forwarding the information to the cellular base station in order to minimise the overall energy consumption. The derived optimum configuration is then used as a benchmark for the proposal and design of a novel context‐based opportunistic MCN forwarding scheme that exploits context information provided at low cost by the cellular network. Numerical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed context‐based opportunistic forwarding can achieve a performance close to that obtain with the optimum configuration and reduce the energy consumption by more than 90% compared with traditional single‐hop cellular communications. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.