On the Effect of Cooperative Relaying on the Performance of Video Streaming Applications in Cognitive Radio Networks

The problem of optimal resource allocation to share high-quality multimedia content in cognitive ad hoc networks with cooperative relays is addressed in this paper. Cooperative transmission is a promising technique to increase the capacity of wireless links by exploiting spatial diversity without multiple antennas at each node. However, mainstream research in this field focuses on optimizing physical layer performance measures, with little consideration for application-specific and network-wide performance measures. In this paper, the problem of joint video encoding rate control, power control, relay selection and channel assignment is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear problem(MINLP), and a solution algorithm based on a combination of the branch and bound framework and convex relaxation techniques is then proposed. The proposed solution jointly allocates channel, power, video encoding rate, and relay nodes for secondary users to maximize the video quality under the constraints posed by delay-sensitive video applications. Performance evaluation results show that cognitive networks with cooperative relaying can provide considerably higher video quality (in terms of the average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)) than solutions that do not rely on cooperation or without dynamic spectrum allocation.