Cooperative Strategies for End-to-End Energy Saving and QoS Control

Energy efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) have become major requirements in the research and commercial community to develop green communication technologies for cost-effective and seamless convergence of all services (e.g., data, 3D media, Haptics, etc.) over the Internet. In particular, efforts in wireless networks demonstrate that energy saving can be achieved through cooperative communication techniques such as multihop communications or cooperative relaying. Game-theoretic techniques are known to analyze interactions between collaborating entities in which each player can dynamically adopt a strategy that maximizes the number of bits successfully transmitted per unit of energy consumed, contributing to the overall optimization of the network in a distributed fashion. As for the core networks, recent findings claimed that resource over-provisioning is promising since it allows for dynamically booking more resources in advance, and multiple service requests can be admitted in a network without incurring the traditional per-flow signaling, while guaranteeing differentiated QoS. Indeed, heavy control signaling load has recently raised unprecedented concerns due to the related undue processing overhead in terms of energy, CPU and memory consumption. While cooperative communication and resource over-provisioning have been researched for many years, the former focuses on wireless access and the latter on the wired core networks only. Therefore, this chapter investigates existing solutions in these fields and proposes new design approach and guidelines to integrate both access and core technologies in such a way as to provide a scalable and energy-efficient support for end-to-end QoS-enabled communication control. This is of paramount importance to ensure rapid development of attractive 3D media streaming in the current and future Internet.