Achieving Energy Efficiency through the Opportunistic Exploitation of Resources of Infrastructures Comprising Cells of Various Sizes

One of the main challenges of the arising wireless world is to support a wide set of QoS-demanding services. However, the solutions that will be considered should not only take into consideration the optimization of the network performance, but should also be energy efficient both for the operator and the end-user. This paper presents the concept of Opportunistic Networks (ONs) as an energy efficient method to exploit wireless networks. The cases studied in this work comprise a macro base station and femtocells. The proposed solution will offload a proportion of the traffic of the base station to the femtocells, through the creation of an ON. Therefore, the base station will consume less energy since terminals will be rerouted to the femtocells. In addition, the femto-terminals will operate to lower power levels leading to battery savings. Results from simulations are provided to confirm the proposed solution.