Presents the fundamentals of cooperative communications and networking with a holistic approach to principal topics where improvements can be obtained.

Cooperative and relay communications have recently become the most widely explored topics in communications, whereby users cooperate in transmitting their messages to the destination, instead of conventional networks which operate independently and compete among each other for channel resources. As the field has progressed, cooperative communications have become a design concept rather than a specific transmission technology. This concept has revolutionized the design of wireless networks, allowing increased coverage, throughput, and transmission reliability even as conventional transmission techniques gradually reach their limits. Cooperative and relay technologies have also made their way toward next generation wireless standards, such as IEEE802.16 (WiMAX) or LTE, and have been incorporated into many modern wireless applications, such as cognitive radio and secret communications. Cooperative Communications and Networking: Technologies and System Design provides a systematic introduction to the fundamental concepts of cooperative communications and relays technology to enable engineers, researchers or graduate students to conduct advanced research and development in this area. Cooperative Communications and Networking: Technologies and System Design provides researchers, graduate students, and practical engineers with sufficient knowledge of both the background of cooperative communications and networking, and potential research directions.

Offers practitioners, researchers, and academicians with fundamental principles of cooperative communication. This book provides readers diverse findings and exposes underlying issues in the analysis, design, and optimization of wireless systems.

The demand for mobile connectivity is continuously increasing, and by 2020 Mobile and Wireless Communications will serve not only very dense populations of mobile phones and nomadic computers, but also the expected multiplicity of devices and sensors located in machines, vehicles, health systems and city infrastructures. Future Mobile Networks are then faced with many new scenarios and use cases, which will load the networks with different data traffic patterns, in new or shared spectrum bands, creating new specific requirements. This book addresses both the techniques to model, analyse and optimise the radio links and transmission systems in such scenarios, together with the most advanced radio access, resource management and mobile networking technologies. This text summarises the work performed by more than 500 researchers from more than 120 institutions in Europe, America and Asia, from both academia and industries, within the framework of the COST IC1004 Action on "Cooperative Radio Communications for Green and Smart Environments". The book will have appeal to graduates and researchers in the Radio Communications area, and also to engineers working in the Wireless industry. Topics discussed in this book include: Radio waves propagation phenomena in diverse urban, indoor, vehicular and body environmentsMeasurements, characterization, and modelling of radio channels beyond 4G networksKey issues in Vehicle (V2X) communicationWireless Body Area Networks, including specific Radio Channel Models for WBANs Energy efficiency and resource management enhancements in Radio Access NetworksDefinitions and models for the virtualised and cloud RAN architectures Advances on feasible indoor localization and tracking techniquesRecent findings and innovations in antenna systems for communicationsPhysical Layer Network Coding for next generation wireless systems Methods and techniques for MIMO Over the Air (OTA) testing

Cooperative Communications reviews progress in cooperative communication networks. It assembles a representative sample of recent results to serve as a roadmap for the area. The emphasis is on wireless networks, but many of the results apply to cooperation in wireline networks and mixed wireless/wireline networks. Cooperative Communications is intended as a tutorial for the reader who is familiar with information theory concepts but has not actively followed the field. For the active researcher, it serves as an invaluable digest of significant results. It is designed to encourage readers to find new ways to apply the fundamental ideas of network cooperation. It is also intended to make the area sufficiently accessible to practicing network designers.

Facilitating Cooperation for Wireless Systems Cooperative Communications: Hardware, Channel & PHY focuses on issues pertaining to the PHY layer of wireless communication networks, offering a rigorous taxonomy of this dispersed field, along with a range of application scenarios for cooperative and distributed schemes, demonstrating how these techniques can be employed. The authors discuss hardware, complexity and power consumption issues, which are vital for understanding what can be realized at the PHY layer, showing how wireless channel models differ from more traditional models, and highlighting the reliance of PHY algorithm performance on the underlying channel models. Numerous transparent and regenerative relaying protocols are described in detail for a variety of transparent and regenerative cooperative schemes. Key Features: Introduces background, concepts, applications, milestones and thorough taxonomy Identifies the potential in this emerging technology applied to e.g. LTE/WiMAX, WSN Discusses latest wireless channel models for transparent and regenerative protocols Addresses the fundamentals as well as latest emerging PHY protocols Introduces transparent distributed STBC, STTC, multiplexing and beamforming protocols Quantifies regenerative distributed space-time, channel and network coding protocols Explores system optimization, such as distributed power allocation and relay selection Introduces and compares analog and digital hardware architectures Quantifies complexity, memory and power consumption of 3G UMTS & 4G LTE/WiMAX relay Highlights future research challenges within the cooperative communications field This book is an invaluable guide for professionals and researchers in communications fields. It will also be of interest to graduates of communications and electronic engineering courses. It forms part of an entire series dedicated to cooperative wireless systems.

Cooperative devices and mechanisms are increasingly important to enhance the performance of wireless communications and networks, with their ability to decrease power consumption and packet loss rate and increase system capacity, computation, and network resilience. Considering the wide range of applications, strategies, and benefits associated wit