Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks, explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogeneous network deployment based on micro, pico and femto-cells can be used to achieve this goal. Since cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a "green" cellular network technologyComment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

A Comprehensive Survey of Potential Game Approaches to Wireless Networks

Potential games form a class of non-cooperative games where unilateral improvement dynamics are guaranteed to converge in many practical cases. The potential game approach has been applied to a wide range of wireless network problems, particularly to a variety of channel assignment problems. In this paper, the properties of potential games are introduced, and games in wireless networks that have been proven to be potential games are comprehensively discussed.Comment: 44 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E98-B, no. 9, Sept. 201

Optimal Resource Allocation and Relay Selection in Bandwidth Exchange Based Cooperative Forwarding

In this paper, we investigate joint optimal relay selection and resource allocation under bandwidth exchange (BE) enabled incentivized cooperative forwarding in wireless networks. We consider an autonomous network where N nodes transmit data in the uplink to an access point (AP) / base station (BS). We consider the scenario where each node gets an initial amount (equal, optimal based on direct path or arbitrary) of bandwidth, and uses this bandwidth as a flexible incentive for two hop relaying. We focus on alpha-fair network utility maximization (NUM) and outage reduction in this environment. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose an incentivized forwarding based resource allocation algorithm which maximizes the global utility while preserving the initial utility of each cooperative node. Second, defining the link weight of each relay pair as the utility gain due to cooperation (over noncooperation), we show that the optimal relay selection in alpha-fair NUM reduces to the maximum weighted matching (MWM) problem in a non-bipartite graph. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms provide 20- 25% gain in spectral efficiency and 90-98% reduction in outage probability.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure