Editorial for the Special Issue: Green Cognitive and Cooperative Communication and Networking

Abstract

Wireless communication has nowadays become one of the major worldwide causes of energy consumption in the field of ICT, with a devastating impact in terms of pollution and energy waste. As a result, the past decade has witnessed tremendous efforts and progress made by both the industry and academia for improving energy and power efficiency in current and emerging wireless communication networks, among which cognitive and cooperative communication are proposed as key technologies to increase both spectrum and energy efficiency. With cognitive and cooperative communication, the use of larger spectrum band and the opportunistic adaptation of the spectrum use lead to more effective interference management, better spatial and temporal reuse, thus reducing the power consumption. Despite the ever growing interests, the research on green cognitive and cooperative communication and networking is still in its infancy. Some fundamental problems are still open and require immediate studies. This special issue is intended to provide a forum for presenting, exchanging and discussing the recent advances on green cognitive and cooperative communication and networking. In response to the call for paper, we have received 26 paper submissions from both academia and industries that covered a variety of topics. Two rounds of careful review by the guest editors and experts in the field led to 5 papers for inclusion in this issue. In the first article, “Green Cooperative Cognitive Communication and Networking: A New Paradigm for Wireless Networks”, the authors (Lin Chen, Wei Wang, Alagan S. Anpalagan, Athanasios V. Vasilakos, Kandasamy Illanko, Honggang Wang, Muhammad Naeem) provide a comprehensive survey of the green cognitive and cooperative communication and networking techniques from its characteristics point of view to operational details in the eventual deployment. They present a systematic overview on the tools and techniques that can be used to solve problems arising in energy efficiency optimization problem in this context. The need to incorporate green concepts such as multi-input and multi-output, multirate, and multi-carrier systems, short-range low-power communication using small cell networks, and machine to machine communication in emerging and advanced wireless communication technologies is also addressed. Finally, the paper highlights design challenges and open issues in embracing green technologies in different and cross layers of communication and networking. In the second paper titled “Towards Energy-Efficiency in Selfish, Cooperative Networks”, the authors (Chi Harold Liu, Jun Fan, Zhengguo Sheng, Xiumei Fan, Kin K. Leung) propose an adaptive multi-relay selection with power allocation mechanism to offer energy fairness at each node for a cooperative network. Unlike traditional approaches where all nodes are considered to transmit in a collaborative manner, they explicitly consider the situation where nodes exhibit some degree of selfish behavior. Specifically, they introduce a novel concept of the selfishness index and incorporate it into a utility function which denotes the degree a node can benefit from cooperative transmission. Theoretical analysis and simulation results are supplemented to show advantages inmaximizing the network lifetime and guaranteeing the QoS in realistic wireless environments. They also consider the practical situation when nodes consume energy in mode switching, and study the L. Chen (*) Department of Computer Science, University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, France e-mail: Lin.Chen@lri.fr