Opportunistic downlink data delivery for mobile collaborative communities

With the pervasive deployment of various wireless communication systems, heterogeneous network environments are attracting much attention from academia and industry. Along with the advent of such environments, user devices begin to support multiple network interfaces simultaneously. This opens a possibility for a Mobile Collaborative Community (MCC), a group of people volunteering their resources to assist peer members in communication. In this paper, we present a framework to utilize the wireless spectrum, the most scarce resource of a Mobile Network Operator (MNO), and the energy budget of mobile users in an MCC as efficiently as possible. Then we formulate this problem as static and stochastic optimization problems. Additionally, we propose a fast heuristic algorithm to find a near optimal solution to the considered complex optimization problem. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate how much the proposed scheme is of benefit to the MNO and users in MCC. The performance of our heuristic algorithm and the impacts of various parameters on the performance are also investigated. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.