Cooperative MIMO gateways: a promising technique for fast handoff

The multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technique has been portrayed as the next revolution for wireless technologies. The MIMO technique is an effective mechanism to increase capacity and reliability of wireless communications by taking advantage of its spatial multiplexing gain or diversity gain. However, conventional MIMO is expensive: the form factor of the radio is large, multiple RF front ends are required, multiple antennas can be difficult to place on a mobile platform, and the parallel propagation channels may be correlated. The paper investigates an alternative way of implementing MIMO: cooperative MIMO, where multiple nodes coordinate their transmissions so that cooperative parallel transmissions can be established between multiple source nodes and a destination node, and space/time coding is applied on the transmissions. We not only investigate the capacity gain from using cooperative MIMO, we also use cooperative MIMO to perform fast handoff for wireless networks. The performance of the proposed fast handoff approach is evaluated using modeling and simulation (M&S).