Inter-cell interference reduction via store carry and forward relaying

The integration of mobile relays in cellular networks has been recently envisioned as a way of increasing system capacity, coverage and reducing communication energy consumption. In [1] we studied how store carry and forward (SCF) relaying within the cell can be utilized as an underlay message forwarding mechanism to achieve system wide energy savings. In this paper, by deriving optimal routing policies to reduce either the total energy consumption or the total transmit power, we show that the SCF relaying scheme reduces considerably inter-cell interference. We detail the factors affecting the maximum interference reductions, including the delay tolerance of elastic data traffic and flow characteristics of vehicles in the road network which in this case are used as mobile relay nodes.