Throughput in A Cooperative Network and Channel State Information

Cooperative communications greatly enhance the point-to-point link capability to against channel fading, and such performance gain is expected to large wireless ad hoc networks. However, current cooperative networking is based on ideal assumptions of completely known network information and centralized optimization, which is practically infeasible to large ad hoc networks requiring unscalable control signaling overhead. In this paper, the exact throughput of practical cooperative ad hoc network is provided, in which users make autonomous decisions with regard to their network usage based on the current network conditions and their individual preferences. Since preference of each node is shown by the achievable data rate estimated from the channel state information (CSI) of links of each source-destination pair, the cost of acquiring CSI is considered in the throughput analysis. Furthermore, the cooperation beneficial condition and the operation algorithm of each node to guarantee the network operating at the highest throughput are proposed. The proposed algorithm provides a way to control network-level performance by local operations among nodes.