MADF: Mobile-assisted data forwarding for wireless data networks

In a cellular network, if there are too many data users in a cell, data may suffer long delay, and system's quality-of-service (QoS) will degrade. Some traditional schemes such as dynamic channel-allocation scheme (DCA) will assign more channels to hot (or overloaded) cells through a central control system (CC) and the throughput increase will be upper bounded by the number of new channels assigned to the cell. In mobile-assisted data forwarding (MADF), we add an ad-hoc overlay to the fixed cellular infrastructure and special channels-called forwarding channels- are used to connect mobile units in a hot cell and its surrounding cold cells without going through the hot cell's base station. Thus, mobile units in a hot cell can forward data to other cold cells to achieve load balancing. Most of the forwarding-channel management work in MADF is done by mobile units themselves in order to relieve the load from the CC. The traffic increase in a certain cell will not be upper bounded by the number of forwarding channels. It can be more if the users in hot cell are significantly far away from one another and these users can use the same forwarding channels to forward data to different cold neighboring cells without interference. We find that, in a system using MADF, under a certain delay requirement, the throughput in a certain cell or for the whole network can be greatly improved.