New Architecture for Multi-hop Cellular Networks

Traditional single hop cellular architecture fails to provide high quality of services (QoS) throughout the cells area due to many constraints such as the strong attenuation of signal with the distance. This signal degradation results in that mobile stations located at the boundaries of cells experience poor QoS level. For that reason, the multi-hop cellular architectures that use the mobile relays and device to device (D2D) communications have been integrated to overcome the limitations of the single hop cellular technology. However, these integrated multi-hop architectures increase significantly the cost at the management and deployment phases as they are based on adding additional entities such as the fixed relays. In addition, exploiting the mobile devices capabilities continuously for a long period in routing data increases the energy consumption and load of such mobile. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a new architecture for multi-hop cellular networks. The proposed architecture consists of dividing each cell on a set of clusters comprising the mobiles that are within a pre-specified distance. Then, we apply our proposed algorithm performed by the base station to select the head of each cluster. To evaluate our proposal, extensive simulations are performed using Network Simulator (NS-2) tool.