Energy Efficient Scheduling in Content Distribution Collaborative Mobile Clusters

Most of the existing literatures on green communications aimed to improve the energy efficiency at the base station or data server. However, in order to fully experience high rate broadband multimedia services, prolonging the battery life of user equipment is also critical for the mobile terminals, especially for the smartphone users. In this work, we investigate the problem of designing a content distribution mobile platform named collaborative mobile clusters (CMC) via user cooperation to reduce the energy consumption at the terminal side. Specifically, given numbers of users interested in downloading a common content from the operator, both centralized and distributed user grouping and scheduling algorithms are proposed in order to find the proper user to join the CMC in different scheduling time with the objective to obtain energy efficiency as well as user fairness. Through simulation studies, it is shown that a significant energy saving can be achieved by the proposed schemes and user fairness can be maintained as well.