ABSTRACT
In cooperative communication, the term cooperation refers to a node’s willingness to sacrifice its own resources (e.g., energy, transmission opportunity) for the benefit of other nodes. It is thus of fundamental importance to understand how much of one’s resources must be consumed to reap the benefits of the cooperative communication. Putting it in another way, does cooperative communication require more (or fewer) overall resources than conventional, non-cooperative communication to achieve the same level of wireless link quality? How can we best achieve resource savings when employing cooperative communication? This chapter attempts to answer these fundamental questions.
