On the benefits of cooperative video broadcast over WMANs and WLANs

We study the problem of broadcasting video streams over a WMAN to many mobile devices. We propose to form a cooperative network among mobile devices that receive the same video stream, and share received video data over a WLAN. We analytically show that the proposed system outperforms current systems in terms of energy consumption and channel switching delay. Our trace-based simulation results show that the proposed system: (i) achieves as high as 70 % of energy saving gain, (ii) outperforms current systems with only two cooperative mobile devices, (iii) reduce channel switching delay by up to 98%, (iv) is robust under device failure and quickly reacts to network dynamics, and (v) uniformly distributes the load on all cooperative devices