Opportunistic Multihopping for Energy Efficiency: Opportunistic Multihop Cellular Networking for Energy-Efficient Provision of Mobile Delay-Tolerant Services

Cellular operators are facing considerable capacity and energy-efficiency challenges as cellular data traffic keeps rising. Several studies have shown that multihop cellular networks (MCNs) could help tackle these challenges through the integration of device-to-device (D2D) and cellular communications. This article demonstrates that significant energy- efficiency gains can be achieved when MCNs jointly exploit opportunistic networking and the traffic delay-tolerance characteristics of relevant mobile data services.