This Ph.D. dissertation reports on the work performed at the Wireless Communication Laboratory University of Bologna and National Research Council as well as, for six months, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuit (IIS) in Nürnberg. The work of this thesis is in the area of wireless communications, especially with regards to cooperative communications aspects in narrowband and ultra...

Diversity is an effective technique in enhancing the link quality and increasing network capacity. When multiple antennas can not be used in mobile units, user cooperation can be employed to provide transmit diversity. In this paper, we analyze the error performance of coded cooperative diversity with multiple cooperating users over Nakagami fading channels under interference conditions. We der...

In cooperative communication systems, different terminals collaborate to form a virtual-multiple antenna array system and exploit the spatial diversity to achieve a better performance. It can be generally categorized into amplify-andforward protocol and decode and-forward protocol. Among the various cooperative communication protocols which have been proposed in the past decades, the slotted co...

In conventional (non-cooperative) automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocols for radio networks, the corrupted data frames that cannot be correctly decoded at the destination are retransmitted by the source. In cooperative ARQ protocols, data frame retransmissions may be performed by a neighboring node (the relay) that has successfully overheard the source’s frame transmission. One advantage of t...

Cooperative diversity is a powerful tool that can be used to improve the performance of wireless networks. The use of directional antennas has also shown to offer an effective way for efficient bandwidth utilisation. In this study, the authors investigate the effect of both the transmission power and the number of cooperative relays on the maximum achievable throughput in energy-constrained coo...

Title of Dissertation: CROSS-LAYER DESIGN FOR COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING Ahmed K. Sadek, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor K. J. Ray Liu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Cooperative communications is a new communication paradigm in which different terminals in the wireless network share their antennas and resources for distributed tra...

One of the most efficient methods of exploiting space diversity for portable wireless devices is cooperative communication utilizing space-time block codes. In cooperative communication, users besides communicating their own information, also relay the information of other users. In this paper we investigate a scheme where cooperation is achieved using two methods, namely, distributed space-tim...

Wireless ad hoc networks have been attracting more and more attentions in recent years from both academia and industry, because of their low deployment costs and broad applications. Due to the scarcity of the radio spectrum, supporting concurrent transmissions by exploiting the spatial frequency reuse gain is necessary to enhance spectrum utilization. On the other hand, cooperative communicatio...

We propose a network management and control architecture that is able to dynamically load application-specific code, which in turn is able to control resources at a very low level. Recognising the existing diversity of network management and control architectures, we then address the problem of interoperability between control architecture domains. Given such interoperability, we show how clien...