Cooperation in UMTS cellular networks: A practical perspective

This paper is meant to discuss the practical application of cooperative techniques in wireless UMTS cellular networks. In recent years cooperation in wireless networks has been the focus of a considerable research effort and several techniques have been proposed and investigated. Our feeling is that the many theoretical studies existing in the literature should now be applied to more realistic environments to pave the way to practical applications. In this paper we consider well-known cooperative techniques, such as decode & forward and amplify & forward, and we investigate and discuss the benefits their use can grant to UMTS cellular networks. In particular, we evaluate the performance of these two schemes in terms of coverage range extension and we discuss how cooperative nodes characterization influences their effectiveness.