A practical approach to energy efficient communications in mobile wireless networks

Energy efficiency and capacity maximization are two of the most challenging issues to be addressed by current and future cellular networks. Significant research effort has been placed recently in reducing the total energy consumption while maintaining or improving capacity either by introducing more efficient hardware components or by developing innovative software techniques. In this paper we investigate a novel networking paradigm to address the aforementioned problems. By capitalizing on the inherent delay tolerance of Internet type services, we argue that significant energy savings can be achieved by postponing the communication of information for a later time instance with better networking conditions. We device decentralized algorithms for the proposed postponement schemes and show the superior performance of implementing such schemes over the traditional cellular operation.