Two traffic distribution approaches in terminal cooperation over heterogeneous wireless networks

With the rapid development of wireless networks and mobile terminals (MTs), cooperation among MTs in heterogeneous wireless networks is currently widely investigated. Cooperation among MTs has a lot of advantages such as increasing network throughput, decreasing file download time, saving energy. Traffic distribution, which means how to distribute the traffic to the cooperating MTs, is a key issue in MTs cooperation. To improve the quality of service and user´s experience, we propose two distribution approaches: time-based approach and AHP-based (analytic hierarchy process based) approach. In time-based approach, an optimization model is used, in which the transmit time is decreased to the shortest. Besides, with the QoS parameters and cost taken into consideration, we proposed the AHP-based approach, in which the client´s preference is also considered. Both the two proposed approaches show better performance than the traditional approach.