An Iterative Resource Allocation Algorithm for Cooperative Multimedia Communications

Transmit diversity through user cooperation is an attractive proposal for performance enhancement in a mobile communication network. Given the availability of multiple transmission channels from multiple users, we are concerned with the channel, power and rate assignment scheme that offers the maximum capacity while satisfying the multimedia multi-rate requirements. Earlier cooperative schemes often assume that a central processing device is available to find the optimal or suboptimal solution. The corresponding high computing complexity, however, makes the implementation of an energy-efficient cooperative transmission not very practical. In this paper, we present a simple resource allocation scheme that enables each participant user to easily and independently find a near-optimal channel assignment matrix and power allocation vector under certain constraints. Our solution can be used for both mono-rate and multi-rate applications. It is optimal for the former case and gives near-optimal performance for the latter case.