Cooperative Wireless Communication: How far from practical implementation?

Abstract

Cooperative diversity in wireless networks is an attractive new way to increase throughput, reduce energy requirements and provide resistance to channel fading effects. Because of its distributed nature, this new form of diversity allows a network of relatively simple, single-antenna devices to achieve many of the attractive advantages of physical antenna arrays. Many researchers have devoted their attention for designing and analysis of various cooperative schemes based upon modeling and simulation. But there have been fewer efforts directed towards evaluating such techniques through experimentation and subsequently real life implementation. The attractive benefits of cooperative communication is accompanied by many issues which make them challenging for implementation in practical scenario. The expected advantages are highly dependent on the radio propagation environment, network topology, expected data rate, hardware complexity, power optimization, resource allocation methodology and security. The journey from conceptual techniques to the promising next generation standard will be very challenging. Currently, many researchers are independently working on various projects to turn the magnificent concept into reality. In this paper, many such efforts are put together including their implementation strategies, assumptions, limitations and future directions.