Wireless Peer-to-Peer Cooperation: When Is It Worth Adopting This Paradigm?

Cooperation over short-range wireless links among devices downloading remote contents through cellular links is a paradigm quickly gaining ground in the view of answering some of the main issues next-generation wireless applications will rise. Among others, energy consumption, data rate, and transfer time are parameters that may likely benefit from this novel communication concept. Aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of which are the wireless hybrid scenarios where cooperation actually works and which combination of wireless links is more performing with respect to others.