Cooperative diversity in wireless networks: A timing perspective

Cooperative communication between source and destination involves multiple nodes, which help transmit it to the target. These midway nodes, called relays, help in attaining a better signal performance by exploiting certain techniques. In this paper, a basic three nodes (one relay) model is considered. A real time test bed, based on 802.11, was used to implement different existing protocols and to investigate their timings. Addition of another node with the same topology shows some interesting results presented in this paper.