The cost of using cooperation in a wireless network

Cooperation can provide significant benefits for wireless systems, but the overheads required could make it difficult to achieve these gains in practice. In most work in this area, the overheads that may be incurred in a networking context and the interactions with higher layers have been ignored. In this paper, we outline a methodology for developing low-overhead cooperative protocols and for evaluating their performance in a realistic networking context. We first describe some of the sources of overhead in implementing cooperation in a wireless network. Then, we present a strawman protocol and compare its performance with other protocols. Finally, we discuss some approaches to the synthesis of cooperative networking protocols.