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In a cooperative relay-assisted communication system that uses rateless codes, packets get transmitted from a source to a destination at a rate that depends on instantaneous channel states of the wireless links between nodes. When multiple relays are present, the relay with the highest channel gain to the source is the first to successfully decode a packet from the source and forward it to the destination. Thus, the unique properties of rateless codes ensure that both rate adaptation and relay selection occur without the transmitting source or relays acquiring instantaneous channel knowledge. In this paper, we show that in such cooperative systems, buffering packets at relays significantly increases throughput. We develop a novel analysis of these systems that combines the communication-theoretic aspects of cooperation over fading channels with the queuing-theoretic aspects associated with buffering. Closed-form expressions are derived for the throughput and end-to-end delay for the general case in which the channels between various nodes are not statistically identical. Corresponding results are also derived for benchmark systems that either do not exploit spatial diversity or do not buffer packets. Altogether, our results show that buffering - a capability that will be commonly available in practical deployments of relays - amplifies the benefits of cooperation.

In this paper, we consider a scenario in which the source has been offered QoS guarantees subject to token-bucket regulation. The rate of the source should be controlled such that it conforms to the token-bucket regulation, and also the distortion obtained is the minimum. We have developed an optimal scheduling algorithm for offline (like pre-recorded video) sources with convex distortion function and which can not tolerate any delay. This optimal offline algorithm has been extended for the real-time online source by predicting the number of packets that the source may send in future. The performance of the online scheduler is not substantially degraded as compared to that of the optimal offline scheduler. A sub-optimal offline algorithm has also been developed to reduce the computational complexity and it is shown to perform very well. We later consider the case where the source can tolerate a fixed amount of delay and derive optimal offline algorithm for such traffic source.