On Energy Efficiency of the Nearest-Neighbor
Cooperative Communication in Heterogeneous
Networks
Tao Han
∗
, Yu Feng
∗
, Jiang Wang
†‡
, Lijun Wang
§
, Qiang Li
∗
and Yujie Han
∗
∗
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
†
Shanghai Research Center for Wireless Communication, Shanghai, China
‡
Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
§
Department of Information Science and Technology, Wenhua College, Wuhan, China
Email:
∗
{hantao, m201371739, qli_patrick, m201471912}@hust.edu.cn,
†
jiang.wang@wico.sh,
§
wanglj22@163.com
Abstract—In this paper, we consider a two-dimensional hetero-
geneous cellular network scenario consisting of one base station
(BS) and some mobile stations (MSs) whose locations follow a
Poisson point process (PPP). The MSs are equipped with multiple
radio access interfaces including a cellular access interface and
at least one short-range communication interface. We propose a
nearest-neighbor cooperation communication (NNCC) scheme by
exploiting the short-range communication between a MS and its
nearest neighbor to collaborate on their uplink transmissions. In
the proposed cooperation scheme, a MS and its nearest neighbor
first exchange data by the short-range communication. Upon
successful decoding of the data from each other, they proceed
to send their own data, as well as the data received from the
other to the BS respectively in orthogonal time slots. The energy
efficiency analysis for the proposed scheme is presented based on
the characteristics of the PPP and the Rayleigh fading channel.
Numerical results show that the NNCC scheme significantly
improves the energy efficiency compared to the conventional non-
cooperative uplink transmissions.
1
Index Terms—Cooperative communication; Poisson point pro-
cess; heterogeneous cellular network
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays many of mobile stations (MSs), e.g, smart cel-
lular phones, tablets and PADs, are equipped with multiple
radio access interfaces, e.g, cellular radio access, wireless
local area network (WLAN), Bluetooth interfaces and etc.. As
multi-mode MSs, they can constitute heterogeneous cellular
networks (HCNs) and make it possible to improve the perfor-
mance of cellular uplinks by serving as a relay to their neigh-
boring MSs. By some of short-range communication methods
1
The corresponding author is Lijun Wang. The authors would like to
acknowledge the support from the International Science and Technology
Cooperation Program of China (Grant No. 2015DFG12580, 2014DFA11640,
2012DFG12250 and 0903), the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 61471180, 61301128, 61461136004, and
61271224), the NSFC Major International Joint Research Project (Grant No.
61210002), the Ministry of Science and Technology 863 program (Grant No.
2014AA01A707), the Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Department
(Grant No. 2013CFB188), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities (HUST Grant No. 2013ZZGH009 and 2014QN155), and Special
Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (Grant No.
20130142120044), and EU FP7-PEOPLE-IRSES (Contract/Grant No. 247083,
318992 and 610524).
provided by the multi-mode MSs, they can communicate with
each other with significantly high efficiency and quite low
cost. Then the MSs can exploit the short-range communication
links among them along with the uplinks to the base station
(BS) to form the cooperative communication, which can
improve the performance of the HCNs with regard to rate,
outage probability, coverage, energy efficiency and etc.. This
paper focuses on the improvement of the energy efficiency of
uplink cellular communications based on cooperation between
neighboring MSs in HCNs.
Cooperative diversity has already emerged as a new and
effective technique to combat fading and to decrease energy
consumption in wireless networks. The nearest neighbor relay
scheme that relay is chosen to be the nearest-neighbor to the
user towards the BS (access-point) always has been applied
in [1], [2]. [1] proposes and analyzes the performance of two
schemes: a distributed nearest-neighbor relay assignment in
which users can act as relays, and an infrastructure-based
relay assignment in which fixed relay nodes are deployed
in the network to help the users forward their data. [2]
explores the balance between cooperation through relay nodes
and aggregated interference generation in large decentralized
wireless networks using decode-and-forward by the nearest
neighbor relay scheme. [3] proposes an energy-efficient co-
operative multicasting scheme by properly selecting relay
agents (RAs) based on their location, channel condition and
coverage. [4] studies the relay selection schemes to reduce
energy consumption, and the optimal number of cooperative
is also given. Besides, [5] is based on coded cooperation,
which combines cooperation and channel coding together. To
save bandwidth and improve the information transmission rate,
network coding [6] is often used after the MSs receive each
other’s information successfully. But based on some criteria,
[7] finds more scenarios where network coding has no gain
on throughput or energy saving. Further more, many existing
works concentrate on the resource allocation in cooperative
networks. [8] presents both a centralized and a distributed
power allocation schemes to optimize the BER performance
of cooperative networks. To maximize the overall throughput,
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