Content-aware multiple access protocol for cooperative packet speech communications

A novel cooperative multiple access protocol for packet speech communications is proposed, where cooperation is achieved through the deployment of a relay node that exploits the silence periods typical of speech communications. The relay forwards speech packets for active calls using a subset of the free time slots left available by users that are silent. No new channel resources are needed for cooperation and the system encounters no bandwidth losses. Because the resources allocated to the relay are not drawn from the pool of reused resources but from those potentially used for random channel access. Thus, the use of cooperation introduces a tradeoff between the amount of help offered to active calls and the probability of a successful contention for channel access. Such cooperation tradeoff is investigated and guidelines for the choice of protocol parameters are developed. The throughput and delay performance of the proposed protocol are characterized and compared to a similar non-cooperative packet speech protocol. Results demonstrate significant gains achieved by the proposed cooperative protocol. Moreover, the speech quality under the cooperative protocol was measured using a perceptual model, and results reveal significant improvement over the non-cooperative protocol especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime.