Sailing good radio waves and transmitting important bits: Relay cooperation in wireless video transmission

Recently, much progress has been made on the cross-layer optimization of video streams in multiple access networks. The key idea is to use the granular data structure of compressed video to trade quality with bits, and optimally prioritize transmissions given the available bandwidth, in order to obtain proportionally optimal video quality across video streams. Herein, we discuss the effect and potential benefit of using a cooperative-relay strategy in a wireless network, where proportionally optimal video schedules are computed via a multi-user Markov decision process. The idea is that feeble signals of nodes that are located far away from the destination can be enhanced via the cooperation of intermediate nodes, acting as cooperative relays. Our contribution is to indicate a possible solution that would require relatively modest changes to the multi-user optimization framework, while warranting a uniformly better experience to the video users thanks to cooperative coding.