Energy efficiency using cooperative relaying

The rising demand for the high data rates in the future cellular systems, is directly linked with the power consumption at the transmitting nodes. Due to the various economical and environmental factors, it is becoming difficult to maintain the current rate of power consumption per unit of data, for the upcoming generations of the cellular systems. This has shifted the focus of many researchers towards the energy efficiency aspect of the cellular systems and power consumption has become an important design parameter in the recent works. In this article, we propose the use of cooperative communications using low cost fixed relays, in order to reduce the energy consumption at the transmitting nodes for a given quality of service requirement. It has been investigated that, how different factors, such as cell radius, relay position, number of relays and target data rate effects the area energy consumption for the different relaying schemes. It has been shown that, the cooperative relaying schemes along with adaptive resource allocation provides minimum energy consumption along with the better coverage as compared to the non adaptive cooperative relaying schemes.