Energy-aware cooperative networks: Enabling technologies, operation design, and benchmarking

Cooperative Communication Networks (CCNs) have recently emerged as a promising technology for improving spectral efficiency and extending overall network coverage. CCNs have also managed to generate significant interest in the research community for their role in optimizing Energy Efficiency (EE) in next-generation networks. However, envisioning CCN as an energy-saving solution is met with many unresolved problems and significant challenges. In this article, we discuss the enabling technologies for energy-aware CCNs, the challenges behind employing these technologies and the open research issues. We also discuss the lack of benchmarking EE metrics and a performance evaluation framework. We propose an EE scheme for a heterogeneous WiFi-sensor network to address these issues and present a measurement-based methodology to evaluate the proposed scheme. The scheme is designed using Markov Decision Process (MDP). The implementation of the scheme in the proposed testbed demonstrates its ability to provide 63 percent energy-saving in the WiFi network and 82 percent in the sensor network in low traffic network operational conditions.