A minimum energy consuming mobile device relay scheme for reliable QoS support

Abstract

Relay technology is becoming more important for mobile communications and wireless internet of things (IoT) networking because of the extended access network coverage range and reliable quality of service (QoS) it can provide at low power consumption levels. Existing mobile multihop relay (MMR) technology uses fixed-point stationary relay stations (RSs) and a divided time-frame (or frequency-band) to support the relay operation. This approach has limitations when a local fixed-point stationary RS does not exist. In addition, since the time-frame (or frequency-band) channel resources are pre-divided for the relay operation, there is no way to achieve high channel utilization using intelligent opportunistic techniques. In this paper, a different approach is considered, where the use of mobile/IoT devices as RSs is considered. In applications that use mobile/IoT devices as relay systems, due to the very limited battery energy of a mobile/IoT device and unequal channel conditions to and from the RS, both minimum energy consumption and QoS support must be considered simultaneously in the selection and configuration of RSs. Therefore, in this paper, a mobile RS is selected and configured with the objective of minimizing power consumption while satisfying end-to-end data rate and bit error rate (BER) requirements. For the RS, both downlink (DL) to the destination system (DS) (i.e., IoT device or user equipment (UE)) and uplink (UL) to the base station (BS) need to be adaptively configured (using adaptive modulation and power control) to minimize power consumption while satisfying the end-to-end QoS constraints. This paper proposes a minimum transmission power consuming RS selection and configuration (MPRSC) scheme, where the RS uses cognitive radio (CR) sub-channels when communicating with the DS, and therefore the scheme is named MPRSC-CR. The proposed MPRSC-CR scheme is activated when a DS moves out of the BS's QoS supportive coverage range. In this case, data transmissions between the RS and BS use the assigned primary channel that the DS had been using, and data transmissions between the RS and DS use CR A preliminary version of this paper was presented at APIC-IST 2013 and was selected as an outstanding paper. This research was funded by the MSIP(Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning), Korea in the ICT R&D Program 2013. sub-channels. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MPRSC-CR scheme extends the coverage range of the BS and minimizes the power consumption of the RS through optimal selection and configuration of a RS. © 2014 KSII.