This paper describes a comprehensive system architecture that enables mobile-to-mobile communications for the purpose of enhancing the capacity of the cellular network. The architecture is developed using LTE Release-10 as the baseline. The impact on the protocol stack is discussed in detail. Neighbor discovery mechanisms are described to enable users to identify potential helper mobiles to enable a cooperative mobile relay. Resource partitioning for the mobile-to-mobile link is detailed and changes to the design of the HARQ entity structure and timing are discussed.

This work quantifies how persistent increases in processor speed compared to I/O speed reduce the performance gap between specialized, high performance messaging layers and general purpose protocols such as TCP/IP and UDP/IP. The comparison is important because specialized layers sacrifice considerable system connectivity and robustness to obtain increased performance. We first quantify the scaling effects on small messages by measuring the LogP performance of two Active Message II layers, one running over a specialized VIA layer and the other over stock UDP as we scale the CPU and I/O components. We then predict future LogP performance by mapping the LogP model's network parameters, particularly overhead into architectural components. Our projections show that the performance benefit afforded by specialized messaging for small messages will erode to a factor of 2 in the next 5 years. Our models further show that the performance differential between the two approaches will continue to erode without a radical restructuring of the I/O system. For long messages, we quantify the variable per-page instruction budget that a zero-copy messaging approach has for page table manipulations if it is to outperform a single-copy approach. Finally we conclude with an examination of future I/O advances that would result in substantial improvements to messaging performance.