Cooperative Communications

This article reviews progress in cooperative communication networks. Our survey is by no means exhaustive. Instead, we assemble a representative sample of recent results to serve as a roadmap for the area. Our emphasis is on wireless networks, but many of the results apply to cooperation in wireline networks and mixed wireless/wireline networks. We intend our presentation to be a tutorial for the reader who is familiar with information theory concepts but has not actively followed the field. For the active researcher, this contribution should serve as a useful digest of significant results. This article is meant to encourage readers to find new ways to apply the ideas of network cooperation and should make the area sufficiently accessible to network designers to contribute to the advancement of networking practice.