Abstract

In this talk, we will report part of our work on the International Technology Alliance (ITA) project, which is funded by the U.S. Army and U.K. MoD. Our goal is to study new physical-layer techniques and the associated upper-layer protocol designs in the wireless networks. Specifically, among many potential techniques, we consider cooperative transmission, which has been shown to be effective in combating multi-path fading and enhancing receiver reliability. To be specific, we will present our up-to-date work on network routing protocol for wireless cooperative networks as well as performance evaluations of reliability, energy and throughput of cooperative transmission. Our results show that cooperative wireless networks are capable of combating radio unreliability and meeting stringent application requirements of high-speed and high-quality services with high energy efficiency. In addition, we will address key issues of cooperative networks from the theoretical aspects of information theory and cross-layer optimization, which offer a better understanding of the fundamental limits of cooperative networks.