Mechanical forwarding for nomadic mobility in cellular networks

Cellular networks are currently facing significant challenges as mobile Internet access adoption continues to grow over the subscriber base. The challenge that network operators are facing is that Internet data traffic consumes considerably more resources than voice calls, necessitating in that respect significant capacity enhancements. Further, this rise in system utilization has caused a considerable increase in the energy consumption expenditure of both the access network components and the user terminals; in the former case causing a significant increase in cost, for the second case a reduction in the usability of battery operated terminals and for both cases a peak in the carbon footprint of telecoms equipment. Significant research effort has been placed recently in finding innovative solutions to support this boost in data usage demand. In this paper we detail a message forwarding strategy for cellular networks whereby capitalizing on the inherent delay tolerance of Internet type services and utilizing the mobility of nodes, intelligent information forwarding decisions can be made to achieve substantial reductions in the communication energy consumption. We devise optimal look-ahead strategies in which information on either the uplink/downlink is communicated only at the best locations within the system's coverage area to achieve a required performance target. Both analytical and experimental results are presented, showing that significant reductions on the aggregate energy consumption levels can be achieved by the proposed technique.