Cooperative communication allows several nodes to cooperatively transmit signals to a particular destination. Using cooperative communication, wireless networks could mitigate severe channel impairments arising from multipath propagation. In this case, the greater benefits are gained by exploiting spatial diversity in the channel. In this book, an overview on cooperative communication in wireless networks is presented. Practical issues and challenges in cooperative communication are identified. Cooperative routing strategies in different networks (wireless mesh networks, ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks) are discussed. However, cooperative routing strategy in a network with multiple flows may cause collision among helping nodes and thus, reduce the overall system performance. In this book, a new routing protocol based on new routing metric called Contention Sensitive Cooperative Metric (CSCM) is discussed, which takes contention relationship into consideration. Finally, the performance of the routing protocol has been evaluated using simulation. The results demonstrate significant performance improvement of cooperative communication while using CSCM.
