Cooperative Communications in Resource-Constrained Wireless Networks

Cooperative communications have been proposed to exploit the spatial diversity gains inherent in multiuser wireless systems without the need of multiple antennas at each node. This is achieved by having the users relay each others messages and thus forming multiple transmission paths to the destination. In resource constrained networks, such as wireless sensor networks, the advantages of cooperation can be further exploited by optimally allocating the energy and bandwidth resources among users based on the available channel state information (CSI) at each node. In the first part of this article, we provide a tutorial survey on various power allocation strategies for cooperative networks based on different cooperation strategies, optimizing criteria, and CSI assumptions. In the second part, we identify the similarities between cooperative networks and several sensor network applications that utilize collaboration among distributed sensors to achieve the system goal. These applications include decentralized detection/estimation and data gathering. The techniques developed in cooperative communications can be used to solve many sensor network problems