Cooperative round robin multiple access networks for joint rate and QOS enhancement

While almost all cooperative studies focus on the rate increase that relaying networks provide to the system, this paper shows the benefit of cooperation in terms of two potential quality of service (QoS) system measures: fairness and delay. A cooperative multiple-access channel (MAC) protocol is proposed based on round robin scheduling. With it, network users share an aggregate channel behaviour, which is shown to increase their QoS performance. The joint system improvement of rate and QoS is tested under two different cooperative approaches: amplify and forward (A&F) and partial decode and forward (PD&F).