A survey of implementation efforts and experimental design for cooperative communications

Design and analysis of cooperative communication schemes based upon modeling and simulation exist in large quantities in the research literature. Despite this fact, there have been relatively few efforts directed toward implementing and experimentally evaluating such schemes. Cooperative protocols have many components that make them challenging to implement in real-world radio architectures, and their expected gains are highly dependent on the network topology and RF environment in which they operate. As such, experimental work will be crucial in the transition of such schemes from conceptual proposals to next-generation wireless standards. This paper motivates such practical work, surveys existing efforts in the area, and offers future direction for architectural and experimental design.