Energy Efficiency of Network Cooperation for Cellular Uplink Transmissions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel inter-network cooperation scheme for cellular uplink transmissions that leverages multiple network interfaces on user devices to significantly enhance energy efficiency compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

It develops a closed-form expression for energy efficiency considering realistic channel effects and demonstrates the energy savings of inter-network cooperation through numerical analysis.

Findings

Inter-network cooperation improves energy efficiency significantly.

Moving users closer enhances the energy savings.

Inter-network cooperation outperforms non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation.

Abstract

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.