HERRA: Energy-Aware Scalable D2D 5G Cellular Traffic Offloading Scheme

Abstract

Data offloading based on Device-to-Device (D2D) can support congestion-prone cellular networks in the face of traffic growth. In this paper, we tackle the design of offloading systems that are aware of the energy limitation of the complementary D2D network. We propose a novel heuristic scheme, named HERRA, using a parametric three-stage method that includes possible variations on the employed strategies in each stage. Performance evaluation, using network simulations in our extended NS-3, shows that HERRA outperforms the related work in the matter of convergence time. As a result of massive speedups, up to six orders of magnitude, HERRA scales very well in denser topologies at the price of having some performance gaps, particularly in terms of packet loss.