Towards a Better Understanding of Multi-User Cooperation: A Tradeoff between Transmission Reliability and Rate

Cooperative communications involves nodes that exchange information and transmitting jointly to a common destination [1]. Whilst different users sharing content is increasingly common on the network-and data-layer, it has so far not occurred on the physical wireless interface. Cooperative transmission has the underlying potential to dynamically tradeoff data rate with reliability, depending on the multi-media content transmitted. The key prohibitor of this technology is a lack of understanding of the penalties and benefits in sharing signals on a physical level.