Cooperative Power Saving Strategies in Wireless Networks: an Agent-based Model

Power consumption of mobile devices is a major subject of concern for the wireless domain. New multimedia services and advanced communication techniques such as upcoming TV-on-mobile will consume in the early future even more power. This may result in a troublesome energy trap: therefore some solutions shall be found. In this paper a novel system architecture is proposed in order to address power saving, which is neither pure cellular neither peer-to-peer (P2P). Our scheme is based on a cooperative framework that relies on the combination between a central and a short-range communication link. In this study, the power saving technique is tested by means of an agent-based simulation model. The system is designed as a Virtual World of wireless mobile terminals. The nodes are conceived as autonomous agents capable of independent decision-making based on strategies, with no imposed central authority. The strategies pursue the goal of making the cooperative clusters to achieve energy savings. The results of the numerical analysis show considerable power saving potentials of this approach.