New approaches for cooperative use of multiple antennas in ad hoc wireless networks

This paper explores the interaction between cooperative diversity techniques in the physical layer and routing in the network layer. Three approaches have been proposed: relay-by-flooding, relay-assisted routing, and relay-enhanced routing. In relay-by-flooding, the tradeoff between achieved rate and required power is studied for three selective decode-and-forward schemes: simple relay, space-time-coded relay, and best-select relay. In relay-enhanced routing, cooperation is applied to each link of an existing route. Two relay selection approaches are proposed: best-select in the neighbor set and best-select in the decoded set. Best-select in the decoded set is shown to improve the performance significantly.