Enabling user cooperation through embedded coding and awareness of source content dynamics

A challenge when enabling cooperation for conversational multimedia is how to obtain enough resources from the network. One approach is to use the source dynamics and allocate freed up resources from sources in low activity levels. This introduces a tradeoff between cooperation effectiveness and the networks ability to admit more users. This paper presents a scheme that incorporates the use of embedded source codecs, allowing for a tradeoff between source compression and cooperation effectiveness, without affecting the ability to admit more users. This increases the number of users that can be admitted to the network for a target received quality. A scheme is presented to decide when to trade off compression ratio for cooperation.