Principles and implementation challenges of cooperative transmission for realistic WSN

Cooperative transmission is an emerging wireless communication technique that improves wireless channel capacity through multi-user cooperation in the physical layer. This paper is concerned with principles and implementation challenges of cooperative transmission in the realistic wireless sensor networks. Based on the given system model of cooperative transmission, the comparison of performance improvement in terms of outage probability among different cooperative relaying algorithms is made. The potential challenges in realistic WSN implemented by existing radio hardware are analyzed in the last part of the paper.