Opportunistic Cellular Communications for Uplink Capacity Enhancement

Device-centric wireless networks, including Deviceto-Device communications and Multi-hop Cellular Networks, are expected to perform a pivotal role in the design of future 5G wireless networks. In addition, opportunistic schemes have shown to have the potential to enhance the efficiency of devicecentric wireless networks by intelligently exploiting contextand content-awareness. In this context, this paper contributes towards the development of practical opportunistic mechanisms that allow achieving the expected benefits of device-centric wireless networks. In particular, the paper studies the use of opportunistic cellular communications to identify adequate time instants (and locations) for cellular transmissions to take place in device-centric wireless networks under uncertain trajectories of mobile nodes. The obtained results show that the proposed opportunistic schemes allow reducing the time the cellular channel is occupied for the transmission of delay-tolerant information by up to 70% compared to traditional single-hop cellular communications.