Enhanced energy efficiency through self-organizing femto-relay framework

The tremendous advancement in the field of information and communication technology has escalated energy consumption and environment concerns. At the same time, the backhaul constraints limit high data rate services considerably. These challenges motivated the deployment of low-power femto-cells which act as the most promising energy-efficiency enablers for future networks. However, the increasing number of underutilized femtocells result in unwanted energy consumption and spectrum occupancy. Hence, in the strive towards optimizing the energy consumption profiles, this paper proposes the concept of self-organizing femto-relay network capable of enhancing the system capacity with significant energy savings. It aims at routing the traffic of nearby macro-users through idle femto-users via multi-tier cooperation. Analysis and simulation results project a remarkable enhancement in system performance and at the same time improvement in energy efficiency of the network.