Energy Efficiency of Network Cooperation for Cellular Uplink Transmissions

There is a growing interest in energy efficient or so-called "green" wireless communication to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. Since today's wireless terminals are typically equipped with multiple network access interfaces such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks, this paper investigates user terminals cooperating with each other in transmitting their data packets to a base station (BS) by exploiting the multiple network access interfaces, referred to as inter-network cooperation, to improve the energy efficiency in cellular uplink transmission. Given target outage probability and data rate requirements, we develop a closed-form expression of energy efficiency in Bits-per-Joule for the inter-network cooperation by taking into account the path loss, fading, and thermal noise effects. Numerical results show that when the cooperating users move towards to each other, the proposed inter-network cooperation significantly improves the energy efficiency as compared with the traditional non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation. This implies that given a certain amount of bits to be transmitted, the inter-network cooperation requires less energy than the traditional non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation, showing the energy saving benefit of inter-network cooperation.Comment: in Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2013), Budapest, Hungary, June 201

Energy Aware Transmission in Cellular Uplink with Clustered Base Station Cooperation

We provide an analytical formula to evaluate the performance of the uplink of planar cellular networks when joint processing is enabled among limited number of base stations in a generalised fading environment. Focusing on user transmission power allocation techniques to mitigate inter-cluster interference we investigate the system's spectral-energy efficiency trade-off. The paper addresses the gains in both cell throughput and transmissions energy efficiency due to the combined strategies of base station cooperation and user power management. We assess the effect of the propagation environment and of the key network design parameters of cooperation cluster size and inter-site distance on the overall performance providing numerical results for a real-world scenario

Spectral Efficient and Energy Aware Clustering in Cellular Networks

The current and envisaged increase of cellular traffic poses new challenges to Mobile Network Operators (MNO), who must densify their Radio Access Networks (RAN) while maintaining low Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure to ensure long-term sustainability. In this context, this paper analyses optimal clustering solutions based on Device-to-Device (D2D) communications to mitigate partially or completely the need for MNOs to carry out extremely dense RAN deployments. Specifically, a low complexity algorithm that enables the creation of spectral efficient clusters among users from different cells, denoted as enhanced Clustering Optimization for Resources' Efficiency (eCORE) is presented. Due to the imbalance between uplink and downlink traffic, a complementary algorithm, known as Clustering algorithm for Load Balancing (CaLB), is also proposed to create non-spectral efficient clusters when they result in a capacity increase. Finally, in order to alleviate the energy overconsumption suffered by cluster heads, the Clustering Energy Efficient algorithm (CEEa) is also designed to manage the trade-off between the capacity enhancement and the early battery drain of some users. Results show that the proposed algorithms increase the network capacity and outperform existing solutions, while, at the same time, CEEa is able to handle the cluster heads energy overconsumption