Exploiting the overhearing capabilities of transmitting nodes to increase the energy efficiency in dense networks

The 1000-fold capacity increase envisioned by dense 5G networks results also in a tremendous increase in the energy consumption of the whole network. Utilizing relays in combination with physical-layer network coding (PNC) has been proposed as an energy-efficient solution to this problem by creating several short-distance low-power transmissions and by reducing the transmission time. However, deploying relay nodes can be very costly for dense networks. On the other hand, the proximity of transmitting nodes in dense networks allows the transmitting nodes to serve as relays and retransmit the signals overheard from other transmitting nodes using PNC. This approach has been shown to increase the spectral efficiency, but the impact on energy efficiency has not been studied yet. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze two approaches that exploit the overhearing capabilities of the transmitting nodes in terms of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and success rate. We then provide a low-complexity power control strategy that achieves a performance close to the optimal for each approach. We show that when at least one indirect link is stronger than the direct links, exploiting the overhearing capabilities of the transmitting nodes provides the highest performance in both the transmit power-dominated and circuit power-dominated regimes.