  There is a growing interest in energy efficient or so-called "green" wireless
communication to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. Since
today's wireless terminals are typically equipped with multiple network access
interfaces such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks, this paper
investigates user terminals cooperating with each other in transmitting their
data packets to a base station (BS) by exploiting the multiple network access
interfaces, referred to as inter-network cooperation, to improve the energy
efficiency in cellular uplink transmission. Given target outage probability and
data rate requirements, we develop a closed-form expression of energy
efficiency in Bits-per-Joule for the inter-network cooperation by taking into
account the path loss, fading, and thermal noise effects. Numerical results
show that when the cooperating users move towards to each other, the proposed
inter-network cooperation significantly improves the energy efficiency as
compared with the traditional non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation.
This implies that given a certain amount of bits to be transmitted, the
inter-network cooperation requires less energy than the traditional
non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation, showing the energy saving
benefit of inter-network cooperation.
