Topology Control in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with Cooperative Communications

Cooperative communication has received tremendous interest for wireless networks. Most existing works on cooperative communications are focused on link-level physical layer issues. Consequently, the impacts of cooperative communications on network-level upper layer issues, such as topology control, routing and network capacity, are largely ignored. In this article, we propose a Capacity-Optimized Cooperative (COCO) topology control scheme to improve the network capacity in MANETs by jointly considering both upper layer network capacity and physical layer cooperative communications. Through simulations, we show that physical layer cooperative communications have significant impacts on the network capacity, and the proposed topology control scheme can substantially improve the network capacity in MANETs with cooperative communications.