Multimedia Relay Resource Allocation for Energy Efficient Wireless Networks: High-Layer Content Prioritization With Low-Layer Diversity Cooperation

With the popularity of versatile mobile multimedia applications and the pressing need to reduce energy consumption in future wireless networks, new challenges have been posed to maintain adequate coverage, quality of service, and reliability for big-scale multimedia traffic. Specifically, in this paper we introduce a cooperative multimedia relay framework and investigate premium-regular-diversity-based multimedia resource allocation treatment approaches. We also comparatively study five generic wireless multimedia relay scenarios including direct transmission, single relay, multiple pure relays, relay cooperation with space-time coding, and relay coordination with distributed beamforming. The key contribution of the new relay resource allocation framework is that packet importance priority diversity at the application layer is jointly considered with spatial diversity and relay coordination protocols at lower layers. Premium packets and regular packets of multimedia streams are adaptively allocated to relay nodes, and transmission resources are optimally allocated with regards to energy budget. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed resource allocation paradigm using multirelay coordination has significant video quality enhancement and energy saving potentials to support future big-data wireless multimedia traffic.