Exploiting Network Cooperation in Green Wireless Communication

There is a growing interest in energy efficient or so-called "Green" wireless communication to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. Since today's wireless terminals are typically equipped with multiple network access interfaces such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks, this paper investigates user terminals cooperating with each other in transmitting their data packets to the Base Station (BS), by exploiting the multiple network access interfaces, called inter-network cooperation. The authors also examine the conventional schemes without user cooperation and with intra-network cooperation for comparison. Given target outage probability and data rate requirements, they analyze the energy consumption of conventional schemes as compared to the proposed inter-network cooperation by taking into account both physical-layer channel impairments and upper-layer protocol overheads.