A utility-based terminal selection mechanism for terminal cooperation in heterogeneous wireless networks

Cooperation among mobile terminals (MTs) in heterogeneous wireless networks is currently widely investigated. Cooperation among MTs has a lot of advantages such as increasing network throughput, decreasing file download time, saving energy and so on. Since different cooperate MTs have different influence on quality of service and user's experience, MT selection becomes a key issue in MTs cooperation. To improve the quality of service and user's experience, we propose a novel mechanism for MT selection which we call NMC (Network MTs Cooperation) mechanism in this paper. In NMC mechanism, MTs and its access network are integrated as a virtual MT. Then we propose a Cooperative Terminal Selection (CTS) algorithm to select the optimal virtual MT. Simulation results show that NMC can help to save energy consumption of MTs as well as ensure the download rates.