Editorial - Special Issue on Cooperative Wireless and Mobile Communications

The fundamental idea of cooperative communications in wireless networks originates from the design of multiple-antenna systems. In multiple-antenna systems, communicating terminals are equipped with multiple antennas to mitigate the effects of multipath fading and optimise the communication rate in the network. Wireless communication nodes like cellular phones and sensor nodes have size restrictions, power supply limitations and are only able to accommodate a limited level of complexity. It is thus unfeasible to equip them with multiple antennas. The effects of multipath fading are critical in cellular, ad hoc and sensor networks because the physical deployment of communicating nodes makes them susceptible to interference. It is imperative to adopt a mechanism to combat fading in such networks. The broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes it easy for the communicating nodes to hear each other. They can share their physical resources specifically their single antennas, thereby creating a virtual multiple-antenna array. Cooperative communications is a concept where several single-antenna nodes cooperate and form a distributed multiple-antenna system which combats multipath fading. In recent years, cooperative communications have received extensive world-wide attention and significant advances in both research and applications have been achieved.