Multi-node cooperative resource allocation to improve coverage area in wireless networks

It is of great importance for service providers to improve the coverage area without cost of more infrastructure in wireless networks especially in rural areas. Recently, cooperative communication has brought a new communication paradigm. In this paper, multi-node cooperative resource allocation is studied to schedule the transmission time slots so as to maximize the network overall rate (or the coverage area) under the Quality of Services constraints. To optimize the performance, first, the performance of the multi-node cooperative transmission is analyzed. Then a protocol is constructed between the mobiles and the base station for the resource allocation. From the simulation results, the proposed scheme can increase the user's rate by 5% for large cell sizes and improve the coverage by 180%, compared with the traditional scheme without cooperative transmission.