Opportunistic networking for improving the energy efficiency of multi-hop cellular networks

Relaying technologies can help address the capacity and energy-efficiency challenges faced by cellular networks as a result of the rapid increase in mobile data consumption. A non-negligible portion of such consumption corresponds to delay tolerant services. This delay tolerance offers the possibility for opportunistic networking to exploit contact opportunities between mobile devices in order to reduce the impact of data traffic on the cellular capacity and energy-efficiency without sacrificing the end-user quality of service. In this context, this paper investigates the use of opportunistic forwarding in MCN-MR (Multi-hop Cellular Networks with Mobile Relays) to reduce energy consumption in the case of delay tolerant services. The study proposes to exploit context information provided at a low cost by the cellular infrastructure to efficiently select the forwarding node in a two-hop MCN-MR scenario. The proposed solution results in significant energy savings compared to traditional single-hop cellular communications and other forwarding solutions reported in the literature.