Distributed protocols for user cooperation in multi-user wireless networks

Cooperative communication has recently emerged as an effective form of signaling in wireless fading channels. This work examines cooperative communication in multi-user networks, where the geometry of information flow becomes an issue, i.e., who should cooperate with whom? In particular, one is interested in algorithms that do not require global network information, which is often unavailable due to latency, limited memory, or other constraints. In this work we propose and study distributed protocols for partner selection in cooperative networks. In this class of protocols, wireless users act individually and independently in establishing cooperative communication, without the aid of a central authority. Such a setup is especially of interest in ad-hoc networks, or networks of wireless sensors. We perform outage analysis for the proposed protocols, showing that full diversity in the number of cooperating users is achieved. The cooperative network with the proposed protocols performs significantly better than the non-cooperative counterpart.