Work in progress: Energy saving through cooperation in wireless personal networks

Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of wireless technologies and applications. Without disruptive new approaches for energy saving, 4G mobile users will relentlessly be searching for power outlets rather than network access, and become once again bound to a single location. In this paper, we explore the cooperation among nodes in a cluster for the main goal of saving the battery power of mobile terminals. This paper studies the possibility of decreasing energy consumption through relaying data from all nodes in a cluster through the cluster head. A game theoretic framework is considered based on the classical duopoly model of Cournot. This is a trading model in which the relay behaves as the seller and the sources as buyers. Whenever the relay delineates a possibility for revenue, a portion of its resource space is reserved for cooperation for some price, which takes into consideration the degradation in terms of quality of service and the energy consumed from its own battery in forwarding packets on behalf of sources nodes in the cluster. Results demonstrate the gains in energy saving.