An efficient and fair cooperative approach for resource management in wireless networks

In cellular networks, the implementation of various resource management processes, such as bandwidth reservation and location updates, has been based on the one‐to‐one resource management information exchange paradigm, between the mobile nodes and the base stations. In this paper, we design and demonstrate the use of a distributed cooperative scheme that can be applied in the future wireless networks to improve the energy consumption for the routine management processes of mobile terminals, by adopting the peer‐to‐peer communication concept of wireless ad hoc networks. In our approach, the network is subdivided into one‐hop ad hoc clusters where the members of each cluster cooperate to perform the required management functions, and conventional individual direct report transmissions of the mobile terminals to the base stations are replaced by two‐hop transmissions. The performance evaluation and the corresponding numerical results presented in this paper confirm that our proposed scheme reduces significantly the overall system energy consumption when compared with the conventional one‐to‐one direct information management exchange approach. Furthermore the issue of fairness in dynamically selecting the various cluster heads in successive operational cycles of the proposed scheme is analyzed, and an enhanced algorithm is proposed and evaluated, which improves significantly the cluster head selection fairness, in order to balance the energy consumption among the various mobile terminals. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.