Capacity Bounds and Code Designs for Cooperative Diversity

Cooperative diversity is a novel technique for conveying information in wireless networks, where closely located single-antenna network nodes cooperatively transmit and/or receive by forming virtual antenna arrays. For the simplest cooperative setup with two transmitters and two receivers, we first present the latest advances made in determining the theoretical capacity bounds and point out the important roles of coding with side information in achieving the lower bounds on the capacity region. We then focus on practical code designs and describe two coding schemes: one for receiver cooperation based on Wyner-Ziv coding; another for transmitter cooperation based on dirty-paper coding. The two designs perform close to the theoretical bounds and show the gains of cooperative communications predicted by theory.