Energy optimization of D2D communications using relay devices and data entropy

Device-to-device (D2D) communications are announced as a cornerstone of the next generation of wireless communications (5G). They offer the promise to drastically reduce the energy consumption of devices (phones, tablets, etc.), and increase network coverage areas. In this paper, we propose to study the influence of a relay device in a D2D communication. We aim to show the impact of relaying on the energy consumption. Our work provides a new perspective on the D2D communications by integrating innovative topology in these communications. Indeed, D2D is a local-area-based type of communications. Then, we assume that the data transmitted by different users have a certain correlation between each other. Therefore, a new approach is to use the common entropy between each D2D devices to reduce the amount of data relayed by the relay device. This minimization leads inevitably to a reduction of the energy consumed by the relay device, and the network. We analyze the optimal case (in terms of position of the relay node and correlation coefficient between different data) to validate the proposed topology, based on conditional entropy.