A cooperative multihop approach for energy efficient wireless content distribution

Cooperative content distribution for the purpose of energy minimization is investigated in the framework of multihop wireless networks. Mobile terminals cooperate to receive content of common interest from the base station and distribute it using multihop cooperative techniques. The problem is formulated as an integer linear program and an efficient suboptimal content distribution approach is presented. The proposed approach is shown to lead to significant energy savings compared to the non cooperative scenario. In addition, it is shown to reduce the total delay in the content distribution process and to release a significant portion of the base station bandwidth.