DRONEE: Dual-radio opportunistic networking for energy efficiency

Reducing the power consumption of smartphones is becoming more and more important as smartphones become an indispensable component of our daily activities. In this work, we propose a novel scheme, so called DRONEE, that dramatically ameliorates energy efficiency for uplink transmissions, while achieving near-optimal throughput and high fairness levels in cellular networks. Our proposal consists in a novel two-tier uplink forwarding scheme in which users cooperate by forming clusters of dual-radio mobiles for hybrid wireless networks. The impact of our proposal is threefold: (i) energy efficiency is boosted by allowing mobiles to relay the cellular traffic through intra-cluster ad hoc communications, which leads to reduction of power-hungry cellular transmissions; (ii) cellular capacity is augmented by scheduling uplink transmissions from mobiles with the best channel; (iii) almost perfect fairness is achieved by allowing users to share the cellular resources within their cluster. We corroborate the practical relevance of our proposal by providing a first-order discussion on the implementability of DRONEE using LTE and WiFi Direct. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.