Managing Cooperation in Wireless Networks: Interference, Feedback, and Cognitivity

Abstract

Recently, cooperative relaying techniques have attracted huge atten- tion since they have quite appealing properties for both performance and practical implementation. Even though there has been a great deal of re- search on cooperative networks, most studies made idealistic assumptions and ignored challenging issues such as interferences from other cooperative groups, contents of feedback information, congestion on feedback links, and imperfect channel estimations. In this thesis, the impact of these selected issues is investigated, and management solutions that mitigate performance degradation are provided, in chapter 2. In chapter 3, we design and propose advanced cooperative protocols that enhance the performance of conven- tional cooperative relaying by combing it with emerging techniques, such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, cognitive radio, and network coding.