A Cooperation-Aware Routing Scheme for Fast Varying Fading Wireless Channels

In this paper, the authors propose a cooperation-aware routing scheme based on long-term statistics of cooperative links. The proposed scheme fully exploits cooperation on fading scenarios and proves to be more efficient than greedy cooperation-aware routing based on instantaneous link conditions. Moreover, the performance improvement is even higher when cooperative and non-cooperative nodes coexist. Cooperative communication is a powerful technique to provide spatial diversity to single-antenna nodes. The cooperative protocols allow nodes to share their antennas and act as relays for communications of their neighbors.