We investigate the impact of cooperative relaying on uplink multi-user (MU) wireless video transmissions. We analyze and simplify a MU Markov decision process (MDP), whose objective is to maximize the long-term sum of utilities across\udthe video terminals in a decentralized fashion, by jointly optimizing the packet scheduling and physical layer, under the assumption that some nodes are willing to act as cooperative relays. The resulting MU-MDP is a pricing-based distributed resource allocation algorithm, where the price reflects the expected future congestion in the network.\udCompared to a non-cooperative setting, we observe that the resource price increases in networks supporting low transmission rates and decreases for high transmission rates. Additionally, cooperation allows users with feeble direct signals to significantly improve their video quality, with a moderate increase in total network energy consumption \udthat is far less than the energy these nodes would require to achieve the same video quality without cooperation.
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