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

The paper explores the interaction between cooperative diversity techniques, in the physical layer, and routing, in the network layer. Three approaches are proposed: relay-by-flooding; relay-assisted routing; 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; 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; best-select in the decoded set. Best-select in the decoded set is shown to improve the performance significantly.