Cooperative connectivity models and bounds for wireless relay networks

Cooperative communication is a recent paradigm for wireless relay networks wherein multiple wireless terminals share their resources to jointly transmit information of which they are not the source in order to achieve an improvement in overall performance. This is realized via the application of cooperative diversity techniques that take advantage of the spatial diversity offered by cooperation between wireless terminals. This dissertation addresses wireless relay networks with an arbitrary number of cooperating wireless terminals, arbitrary sets of communication links between pairs of cooperating terminals, and arbitrary numbers of antennas at each cooperating terminal.;The starting point for any analysis of wireless relay networks is the development of a system model that allows comparison of key performance characteristics such as signal to noise ratio, probability of error, and probability of outage. This dissertation develops a general system model for arbitrarily connected wireless relay networks. Since increased spatial diversity is one of the key benefits expected of cooperative connectivity it is especially important to understand the bounds on the maximum achievable diversity order of wireless relay networks with arbitrary cooperative connectivity. This dissertation develops upper bounds on the maximum diversity order for arbitrarily connected wireless relay networks. Each of the cooperative diversity techniques presented in the literature places different requirements on the system resources that must be available, and therefore system resource constraints that limit the connectivity of individual terminals also constrain the cooperative diversity techniques that can be applied. This dissertation develops a framework for modeling cooperative connectivity that exposes the relationship between available system resources and achievable cooperative connectivity.