Offloading Mobile Traffic via Green Content Broker

A continuous surge of mobile data traffic not only congests mobile networks but also results in a dramatic increase in the energy consumption of mobile networks. Device-to-device (D2D) communications is a promising technique for offloading mobile data traffic and enhancing energy efficiency of mobile networks. By enabling D2D communications, the base stations (BSs) may reduce their energy consumption through traffic offloading, and mobile users may increase their quality of services by retrieving contents from their neighboring peers instead of the remote BSs. By leveraging D2D communications, we propose a novel mobile traffic offloading scheme-the content brokerage. In the content brokerage scheme, a new network node called the green content broker (GCB) is introduced to arrange the content delivery between the content requester and the content owner. The GCB is powered by green energy, e.g., solar energy, to reduce the CO₂ footprints of mobile networks. In the scheme, maximizing traffic offloading with the constraints of the amount of green energy and bandwidth is an nondeterministic polynomial time (NP) problem. We propose a heuristic traffic offloading (HTO) algorithm to approximate the optimal solution with low computational complexity. Our simulation results valid the performance of the content brokerage scheme and the HTO algorithm.