Cooperative Broadcast in Large-Scale Wireless Networks

This chapter studies the cooperative broadcasting in wireless networks. We especially focus on multistage cooperative broadcasting in which the message from a source node is relayed by multiple groups of cooperating nodes. Interestingly, group transmissions become beneficial in the case of broadcasting as opposed to the case in traditional networks where receptions from different transmitters are considered as collision and disregarded. Different aspects of multistage cooperative broadcasting are analyzed in the chapter: (i) coverage behavior; (ii) power efficiency; (ii) error propagation; (iv) maximum communication rate. Whenever possible, performance is compared with multihop broadcasting where transmissions are relayed by a single node at each hop. We consider a large-scale network with many nodes distributed randomly in a given area. In order to analyze such networks, an important methodology, the continuum limit, is introduced. In the continuum limit, random networks are approximated by their dense limits under sum relay power constraint. This method allows us to obtain analytical results for the analysis of cooperative multistage broadcasting.