Energy bills are on the rise and with the recent attention to saving the global environment. Saving energy (minimizing energy consumption) is becoming a standard issue for all industrial and commercial applications. Moreover, provisioning of quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic in wireless networks is complicated due to user mobility and limited wireless resources. Bandwidth (throughput) and hop count and are the important parameters in QoS requirements. In this article, a novel QoS constrained minimum power cellular ad hoc augmented network (QCMP CAHAN) architecture is proposed for next generation wireless networks. The QCMP CAHAN architecture is proposed to find the optimal minimum power route under bandwidth and hop-count constraints (QoS constraints). The QCMP CAHAN has a hybrid architecture, in which each mobile terminal (MT) of CDMA cellular networks has ad hoc communication capability. The QCMP CAHAN is an evolutionary approach to traditional cellular networks. We show that the total energy consumed by the MTs is lower in the case of QCMP CAHAN than in the case of traditional cellular networks. As the ad hoc communication range of each MT increases, the total transmitted energy in QCMP CAHAN decreases. However, due to the increased number of hops involved in information delivery between source and destination, the end-to-end delay increases. The maximum end-to-end hop count will be limited to a specified tolerable value, and QCMP CAHAN has ability to adapt to various hop-count constraints for different services. A MT in QCMP CAHAN will not relay any message when its ad hoc communication range is zero, and if this is the case for all MTs, then QCMP CAHAN reduces to the traditional cellular networks. Moreover, the bandwidth constrained problem in QCMP CAHAN is described as a nonlinear programming problem to minimize the total power consumption. We solved the bandwidth constrained problem in QCMP CAHAN by allocating optimum traffic rates on different routes between source and destination.
