Cooperative versus non-cooperative communications

In this paper, we review some of the prominent gains achieved with cooperative communications, a new way of communications, which has found its applications in almost every wireless network, from cellular to sensor networks. Cooperative communications is a way of transmission, where wireless users not only transmit their own information, but also repeat other users' information during its transmission to a common destination. On the other hand, a non-cooperative communications is the classical multiple access channel, where users send directly to a common destination, without repeating for one another. We discuss the achievable rates and error rate performance both for cooperative and non-cooperative communications.