A cooperative resource allocation strategy for multi-rate transmissions in wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a cooperative bandwidth allocation strategy for conventional multi-rate transmission in wireless networks. It efficiently assigns the available bandwidth according to the transmission rate in order to enhance the overall performance without additional power consumption. The low rate users cooperate with the high rate users by dedicating a part of their bandwidth to either relay the data or send a part of it. A thorough performance assessment is performed to evaluate the proposed strategy against the conventional management that fairly share the bandwidth regardless of the transmission rate. The cooperative strategy illustrates in terms of the probability of error and outage an enhanced performance and remarkable capability to support higher rates under different transmission conditions.