Energy-Efficient Cooperative Communications for Multimedia Applications in Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

The dramatic growth of mobile multimedia communications imposes new requirements on quality-of-service and energy efficiency in wireless networks. In this paper, we study the energy- and spectrum-efficient cooperative communication (ESCC) problem by exploiting the benefits of cooperative communication (CC) for mobile multimedia applications in multi-channel wireless networks. In a static network, it is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem. To solve this problem, we use linearization and reformulation techniques to transform it into a mixed-integer linear programming problem that is solved by a branch-and-bound algorithm with enhanced performance. To deal with the problem in dynamic networks, we propose an online algorithm with low computational complexity and deployment overhead. Extensive simulations are conducted to show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the performance of energy efficiency in both static and dynamic networks.