Energy efficiency of network-coding enabled mobile small cells

TL;DR

This paper investigates an energy-efficient cooperation scheme using network coding in mobile small cells, demonstrating significant energy savings under certain network density conditions through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel network coding-based cooperation scheme with clustering and group head coordination to improve mobile device energy efficiency.

Findings

Energy efficiency increases with network coding at low densities.

Above certain densities, cooperation schemes do not improve energy efficiency.

Power consumption reduces when devices transmit via nearby base stations.

Abstract

Energy efficiency becomes increasingly important due to the limited battery capacity in wireless devices while at the same time user throughput requirements are relentlessly increasing. In this paper, we study an energy efficient cooperation scheme which employs network coding to enhance the energy efficiency for mobile devices. Herein we propose that the mobile devices are clustered into mobile small cells with one of the mobile devices acting as a group head with basic transceiver, coding and relaying functionalities. Group heads coordinate the transmissions from the mobile devices in the mobile small cell to the network's base stations. The objective function of the cooperative scheme is to minimize mobile devices' energy consumption subject to a certain bit error probability. The proposed network-coding based scheme has been evaluated by means of numerical simulations and compared to both a conventional direct transmit scheme, with no cooperation groups, and a cooperative relaying scheme. Results show that, with network-coded cooperation, energy efficiency may significantly increase provided the density of base stations and mobile devices is below a certain value. Above this value none of the compared cooperation schemes may improve energy efficiency, but rather power consumption is reduced only when mobile devices transmit via base stations in their close proximity.