Energy-efficient quality-of-service-aware cooperation in wireless networks

Conventional cooperative diversity techniques consider a three-node setup, which involves a pair of source-destination nodes and a signal relay node. It is noted that the existing cooperation schemes are performed in a session-based manner in which the role of each node being a source or relay remains unchanged during each session. The radio resource allocation and the associated performance analysis are not jointly performed. As a result, resource utilisation is less efficient. In this paper, an energy-efficient quality-of-service (QoS)-aware cooperative transmission strategy based on joint resource allocation is proposed. Two source nodes with distinct destinations and QoS requirements are simultaneously considered in resource allocation to optimise the energy efficiency. The QoS outage probability is derived analytically and the attainable energy efficiency is investigated for the proposed scheme. Numerical results show that significant performance gain can be achieved for both node pairs with the proposed cooperation scheme.