Lowering Area Power Consumption via Coded Cooperation Assisted by Layered Relays

Energy efficiency in cellular networks has recently received a significant attention and incorporating cooperative relays in cellular networks is believed to be a promising technology to greatly lower the energy consumption of cellular networks while sustaining high data rates. In this paper, we focus on improving energy efficiency of a single cellular system assisted by relays. We propose a novel relay deployment strategy and a corresponding relay selection procedure. Using coded cooperation as the transmission scheme, we derive the area power consumption under a target area spectral efficiency. Besides, the impact of different parameters such as cell radius, target area spectral efficiency, number and position of relays on the area power consumption is also studied. Compared with direct transmission and decode-and- forward (DF) relaying, our work significantly improves the energy efficiency of cellular systems and sheds key insights into the tradeoff between the energy consumption and the spectral efficiency via dynamically adjusting the resource allocation between BS and relay in coded cooperation.