Traffic-Aware Asymmetric Cooperation Diversity for Media Streaming in Wireless Networks

In future wireless networks, cooperating users may create virtual antenna arrays to profit from user cooperation diversity. Even then, fading can severely reduce the quality of real-time media streams. To improve streaming quality in cooperative networks, we propose, firstly, the asymmetric allocation of diversity branches. Secondly, we employ this method in our traffic-aware asymmetric cooperation diversity (TACD) scheme to prioritize important parts of the media streams. We demonstrate by outage analysis and simulation that this approach significantly increases the quality of real-time media streams without introducing additional delays.