On the effectiveness of logical device aggregation in multi-radio multi-hop networks

In this paper we investigate new features of future generation networks, where the availability of several different access technique is integrated by means of common radio resource management interfaces and, at the same time, information about the mobility context and the physical proximity of some nodes is exploited. In particular, we advocate utilizing this knowledge in order to create routing groups of adjacent nodes, which might be beneficial in order to improve connectivity, decrease signalling overhead and increase transmission efficiency. An analytical framework is proposed, which allows the performance evaluation of device aggregation algorithms, by measuring several connectivity metrics (routing hierarchy, amount of information to be exchanged, energy consumption) under the cases where either routing groups are established or not. In this way, many detailed insights for the network connectivity performance are obtained, which can be adapted to any context due to the analytical formulation. Therefore, it might be useful for the evaluation of the grouping effectiveness and its application to real cases.