Swarm-oriented mobile services: Step towards green communication

Green communication is a new focus within the telecommunications industry, leading to various innovative ideas on how to optimize communication in order to achieve energy savings. While the majority of those ideas target the transport layer of communication systems, this paper takes a different approach and proposes an innovation for the application layer by introducing a novel concept in the mobile telecom service provisioning process: the swarm-oriented services. The presented proof-of-concept swarm-oriented mobile telecom service is called the Collaborative Downloading and its primary goal is to lower the mobile users’ overall energy consumption while they are downloading data. In order to enable this service, we designed the self-organizing market-based algorithm (SOMA), which combines swarm intelligence (i.e. self-organization) and market-based (i.e. auctions) mechanisms, while the proof-of-concept implementation is based on multi-agent technology. Analytical results show that the proposed Collaborative Downloading service saved up to 76% of energy in mobile device batteries when compared with the current mobile data download practice (in a scenario with 6 mobile users whose mobile devices support GPRS and Bluetooth networking technologies).

► We model a collaborative service for content delivery. ► Collaboration among mobile users reduces energy consumption of their mobile devices. ► Network congestion decreases as collaboration among mobile users increases. ► The results confirm that the proposed service enables green-aware content delivery.