Smart Social Architecture for Green Distributed Networks

Nowadays, the energy consumption and efficiency of wireless networks have become a societal challenge. In this paper a novel system architecture is proposed to achieve green communications. The proposed smart social architecture exploits the flexibility and adaptability of cognitive radio (CR) technology to interact with the environment and achieve eco-sustainability by means of finding the best transmission opportunities. However, the effort required for CR nodes to obtain sensing measurements might make less effective the potential energy efficiency gain obtainable in CR networks. We thus propose to combine CR and social network technologies to maximize the energy efficiency and the associated context awareness in terms of energy and radio knowledge. In this way it is also possible to reduce the sensing burden of CR devices. Through the proposed approach, a greater awareness of environmental impacts by CR paradigm can be instilled in participating users, devices and backbones. This is based on a novel extension of the concept of social network, and specifically by allowing socialization among all the network actors, both users (as it is already done today) and cognitive devices to develop a much lighter and more flexible distributed infrastructure. The functionalities of the network elements and their interfaces are described in detail.