Towards Energy Efficient Device-to-Device Content Dissemination in Cellular Networks

Considering that the future cellular networks are more content-centric, and content sharing among user equipments (UEs) is more universal, device-to-device (D2D) communication techniques become attractive for their applications to content delivery due to the characteristic of proximal transmissions without needs of high-rate backhaul. However, D2D content delivery may not be energy efficient due to shortage of useful contents for neighbor UEs when content caching and delivery are not well designed. In this paper, we propose an architecture using D2D multicast for content delivery in cellular networks and a practical methodology, which can indicate the time for delivery, the content to be disseminated, and the UEs to receive the delivery, to achieve more energy efficient content delivery for future green cellular networks.