On the capacity and diversity of cooperative wireless communication networks

The explosive expansion of wireless communication applications has imposed great demand in developing wireless communication systems with high spectrum efficiency, high energy efficiency and good quality of service. Cooperative communication has been proposed to meet this demand and is becoming one of the most promising techniques for future wireless communication systems. Taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communication systems, cooperative communication allows users in a network to help each other with the information transmission, which enables more efficient usage of the network resources and/or provides more robust communication links for the network users. In this thesis, we study the effect of user cooperation in wireless communication networks from both spectrum efficiency and communication reliability perspective. In particular, information transmission rates and fundamental tradeoffs between diversity and multiplexing gains are the main focuses. Channel scenarios such as the single-user multi-hop relay channel, the cooperative multiple-access channel (CMAC), and the interference channel (IFC) with source cooperation are investigated.DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EEE