Group Interactions in Wireless Cooperative Networks

This paper introduces a user cooperation technique thought to support content sharing services in wireless environments. WLAN inter-device data exchange is effectively exploited, combined with network coding techniques. Specifically, the content of interest is seeded into the WLAN user group through cellular-enabled devices, while short-range links are used to cooperatively distribute data to all the interested users. The focus is on scenarios where nodes in the same network area are not all interested in the same content, they rather form different cooperative groups. Beneficial effects of intra-group cooperation have already been demonstrated in the past; differently, this research focuses on inter-group cooperation. Objective of this paper is the investigation of any obtainable benefit (either in terms of energy consumption, service latency, or probability of successful service distribution) from such a cooperative attitude of different groups.