| Abstract: | Power control has been a standard issue in modern wireless communications. As a result, several cooperative schemes have been developed towards reducing the downlink transmission power. One possible approach is the use of relays that forward information from the base station (BS) to the mobile stations (MSs). However, up to now, the proposed relaying schemes are focusing solely on channel characteristics. In this work, a novel, content‐aware relaying scheme is introduced, where the MSs can act as active relays based on their requested content and channel quality. Content awareness is achieved with a cross‐layer algorithm, which considers an information‐centric networking layer. The performance of the proposed approach has been evaluated considering a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) cellular configuration with one tier of cells around the central cell, where the downlink transmission power (in terms of mean values) has been compared to the typical non‐content‐aware case. For this reason, a hybrid system—link level simulator has been developed that executes independent Monte Carlo (MC) simulations in parallel. Moreover, the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) physical layer protocol has been employed as well, in order to comply with fourth generation standards. The derived results indicate that, compared to the non‐content‐aware case, the proposed relay transmission algorithm can provide up to 7/17% transmission power gain in medium or highly loaded networks (i.e., 10% and 40% blocking probabilities, respectively) in a symmetric 2 × 2 MIMO configuration (i.e., equal number of transmit and receive antennas). Moreover, compared to the case where no relay transmission is supported, then the aforementioned gain can reach up to 20%. Finally, the proposed algorithm can provide up to 25% reduction on the overall transmission delay from the relay node to the destination compared to the non‐content‐aware case. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
