Cooperative Communications: Hardware, Channel & PHY

Preface

Technological Landscape of the 21st Century

Cooperation is not a natural characteristic attributed to humans. The typical human horizon is focused on short-term gains, which might be due to our instinct-driven subconscious occupying a grander importance than we dare to admit [1]. Cooperating with other individuals or entities, however, usually means that short-term losses may translate into long-term gains – something history has proved to hold true but humans for some reason rarely ever understand. Any cooperative technology depending solely on human decisions is hence a priori doomed to fail. By contrast, if machines have access to some computerized decision making engines only, cooperative schemes become viable communication techniques and are likely to occupy an important place in the technological landscape of the 21st century [2].

For this reason, wireless cooperative communication systems have received significant attention in the past decade and – due to their theoretically infinite design degrees of freedom – a large body of highly useful but also often confusing and contradicting research papers has emerged. Indeed, when we commenced research in this area in 1999, online search engines yielded a handful of papers; today, Google yields almost one million hits when searching for ‘cooperative wireless communications’.

Yet Another Book on Cooperation?

Clearly not! Even though the material of this book can be further complemented by the excellent edited treatises [3–5] ...