Proxy discovery and resource allocation for cooperative multipath routing in cellular networks

Cooperation among mobile nodes during establishment of a cellular connection can improve the performance of the network by lowering the transmission power and increasing throughput of the end nodes. Multipath routing is one way for such cooperation by using multiple parallel paths between source and destination nodes, where the main data stream is split into streams of lower data rates and routed to the destination through cellular and ad-hoc connections. Proxy nodes are defined as the cooperating nodes in the split stream paths. An efficient proxy discovery algorithm is essential for selecting the best set of proxy nodes among all nodes that are volunteering for cooperation. A resource allocation algorithm is also equally important for assigning transmission power and data rates to each of the selected proxies. In this paper, efficient algorithms for proxy discovery and resource allocation are proposed that can minimize the overall network power consumption.