Energy benefits of opportunistic device-centric wireless networks

Device-centric wireless networks, and in particular Multi-hop Cellular Networks (MCN), can improve the capacity and efficiency of wireless networks, and will hence represent a significant element of the 5G ecosystem. Additional gains can be achieved for mobile delay tolerant services when integrating opportunistic networking in device-centric wireless networks. This paper proposes a solution for such integration that is evaluated for the case of 2-hop uplink opportunistic MCN communications. The proposed solution takes into to account the fact that mobile relays might not always be available at the optimum location and time instant, and the fact that sufficient cellular radio resources might not be available when mobile relays want to start forwarding the information towards the base station. The conducted study shows that the proposed scheme can reduce the energy consumption by more than 80% compared to traditional single-hop cellular communications.