A microeconomic-based framework for ‘green’ cooperative communications

The global concern on environmental issues is placing its mark on all sectors of the society, including of course, the wireless telecommunications industry. In this paper, we develop a microeconomic-based `green' radio framework in which a network operator shifts some of its responsibilities towards the intended destination to one of these inactive end-users with the specific intention of reducing the transmitted power of its source nodes and the incurred costs. Our results disclose up to 70% energy savings and up to 65% cost savings over the direct transmission benchmarker, when selecting from approximately 50 eligible relays in the scenario portrayed by the UMTS Rel. 99 standard.