Swarm-oriented mobile services: Step towards green communication

Green communication is a new focus within the telecommunications industry, leading to various innovative ideas how to optimize communication in order to achieve energy savings. While the majority of those ideas target the transport layer of communication systems, this paper takes a different approach and proposes an innovation for the application layer by introducing a novel concept in the mobile telecom service provisioning: the swarm-oriented services. The presented proof-of-concept swarm-oriented mobile telecom service is called the Collaborative Downloading and its primary goal is to lower the mobile users’ overall energy consumption while downloading data. In order to enable this service, we designed the Self-organizing Market-based Algorithm (SOMA), which combines swarm intelligence (i.e. self-organization) and market-based (i.e. auctions) mechanisms, while the proof-of-concept implementation is based on multi-agent technology. Analytical results show that the proposed Collaborative Downloading service saved up to 76% of energy in mobile device batteries when compared with the current mobile data download practice (in a scenario with 6 mobile users whose mobile devices support GPRS and Bluetooth networking technologies). ∗Corresponding author, phone: +385 1 6129748; fax: +385 1 6129832; email: [email protected]; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Unska 3, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia Email addresses: [email protected] (Iva Bojic), [email protected] (Vedran Podobnik), [email protected] (Ana Petric) Preprint submitted to Expert Systems with Applications January 28, 2012 Bojic, Iva; Podobnik, Vedran; Petric, Ana. Swarm-oriented mobile services: Step towards green communication. Expert systems with applications. 39 (2012), 9; 7874-7886.