  The increasing popularity of applications such as video streaming in today's
mobile devices introduces higher demand for throughput, and puts a strain
especially on cellular links. Cooperation among mobile devices by exploiting
both cellular and local area connections is a promising approach to meet the
increasing demand. In this paper, we consider that a group of cooperative
mobile devices, exploiting both cellular and local area links and within
proximity of each other, are interested in the same video content. Traditional
network control algorithms introduce high overhead and delay in this setup as
the network control and cooperation decisions are made in a source-centric
manner. Instead, we develop a device-centric stochastic cooperation scheme. Our
device-centric scheme; DcC allows mobile devices to make control decisions such
as flow control, scheduling, and cooperation without loss of optimality. Thanks
to being device-centric, DcC reduces; (i) overhead; i.e., the number of control
packets that should be transmitted over cellular links, so cellular links are
used more efficiently, and (ii) the amount of delay that each packet
experiences, which improves quality of service. The simulation results
demonstrate the benefits of DcC.
