Scheme for expanding the capacity of wireless access infrastructures through the exploitation of opportunistic networks

The emerging wireless world should encompass the use of cost-efficient networking paradigms in order to provide extra resources to an operator's infrastructure for the provision of services. Opportunistic networks (ONs) are a promising solution towards this direction. The proposed approach assumes that ONs are operator-governed, coordinated extensions of the infrastructure which are dynamically created, maintained and terminated, upon request. Opportunistic networking could be used for the capacity extension of wireless access in order to address opportunistically the issue of the overloading of an infrastructure element. This paper describes the problem of capacity extension in the wireless access, providing a mathematical formulation and also proposes a corresponding solution approach. Evaluation results are also presented in order to obtain some proof of concept for the proposed solution. According to the obtained results through the simulations terminals that switch from a congested BS to an ON may experience an average decrease of their consumption of around 25 %. Also, through the creation of ONs in order to redirect traffic from the congested BS to neighboring cells, a reduction of 15-25 % in the transmission power of the congested BS is observed. Also, the quality of communication is benefited, as delay of successfully delivered messages drops approximately 15-35 %, compared to the congested situation. Moreover, regarding energy aspects, it is presented that terminals which switch to ON need around 27 % lower transmission power to communicate with their neighboring terminals. On the other hand there is a cost to the intermediate nodes that will handle increased traffic, which is an increase of 19 % in average of their transmission power.