ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an abbreviated introduction to the rich and vast literature of cooperative wireless communications. It highlights key remaining challenges in cooperative communications and explains examples of cooperative communications in practical applications. The chapter provides a rather abbreviated introduction to the highly active research field of cooperative communications. It describes a number of well-known cooperative network configurations and cooperative strategies. The chapter considers both one-way relay and two-way relay protocols. It analyses deterministic and dynamic cooperative strategies. The chapter summarizes several analytical results on the performance of the simple three-node relay network. It discusses issues of resource allocation in cooperative communication networks with respect to node scheduling and power allocation. The chapter focuses on several well-known network topologies that are fully wireless. It shows half-duplex relay nodes that can only transmit and receive simultaneously on orthogonal channels. The chapter draws on the more familiar distributed space–time coding by using the simpler Alamouti space–time-block-code example.
