On the impact of D2D traffic offloading on energy efficiency in green LTE-A HetNets

In this paper, the interplay between cooperative device-to-device (D2D) communications and green cellular communications in the long term evolution (LTE) and LTE-advanced (LTE-A) cellular systems is investigated. An efficient approach for grouping mobile terminals (MTs) into cooperative clusters is described. In each cluster, MTs cooperate via D2D communications to share content of common interest. In addition, an energy-efficient approach for putting base stations in sleep mode in an LTE-A heterogeneous network is presented. Finally, both methods are combined in order to ensure green communications for both the users' MTs and the operator's base stations. The presented techniques are investigated in the framework of orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based state-of-the-art LTE cellular networks, while taking resource allocation and intercell interference into account. Results show that the proposed approach leads to energy savings for both the operator and the MTs, while leading to enhanced quality of service for mobile users.