Towards Delay-Tolerant Cognitive Cellular Networks

In this chapter, we explore potential gains resulting from the use of two important technologies for emerging and future cellular networks, namely Cognitive Radios (CR) and Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN). Both of them are in essence opportunistic in their operation and so far have been considered in isolation. The main stance to be defended is that by considering them jointly, significant gains can be achieved in terms of energy savings both at the terminal side and at the network infrastructure. Through a wide set of numerical investigations, we shed light on the possible achievable gains.