Cooperative relaying for wireless local area networks

Abstract

The concept of cooperation in wireless communication networks has drawn significant attention recently from both academia and industry as it can be effective in addressing the performance limitations of wireless networks due to user mobility and the scarcity of network resources. Future wireless systems are provisioned to be highly heterogeneous and interconnected, motivating cooperative relaying to be applied to future mobile networks. This chapter describes the state of the art in this area classified in different families. The main focus is the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer design, analysis, challenges and how cooperative networks can be designed for highly dynamic networks comprising large number of moving nodes.