Relay-assisted network cooperation scheme for green communications in heterogeneous wireless networks

Motivated by financial and environmental considerations, green communication has been a trend to minimize the energy consumption in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a relay-assisted network cooperation scheme, through which we can achieve a reduction of energy consumption in data transmissions while ensuring the quality of service (QoS). When the traffic load is light in a network, the proposed scheme tries to switch off the base station (BS) in this network and assign the corresponding service requests to other networks. To handle these service requests, the proposed scheme selects the best neighboring users as relays to provide data transmissions for the users in the network with BS switched off. Besides, ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is employed to solve the energy consumption minimization problem in proposed scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can remarkably reduce the energy consumption of wireless networks.