Cooperative wireless networks: from radio to network protocol designs

Cooperative communication has been shown as an effective way to exploit spatial diversity to improve the quality of wireless links. The key feature of cooperative transmission is to encourage single-antenna devices to share their antennas cooperatively such that a virtual and distributed antenna array can be constructed, and, as a result, reception reliability can be improved and power consumption can be reduced significantly. With better understanding of such a physical layer technique, it becomes critically important to study how the performance gain of cooperative diversity at the physical layer can be reflected at the networking layer, thus ultimately improving application performance. This article presents an overview of network performance in cooperative wireless networks.