Autonomic cooperation in ad-hoc environments

The concept of integrating cooperative transmission with the paradigm of autonomic networking is becoming hotter and hotter these days. Cooperative transmission has proved to bring substantial improvement in terms of increased system robustness, however, especially in dense ad-hoc environments, there appears an urgent need for the incorporation of autonomic routines. In fact, the ability of an ad-hoc network to expose autonomic behaviors would enable the very desirable feature of self-management so that numerous concurrent cooperative and non-cooperative transmissions could be scheduled without any human intervention. Is is especially interesting because, given the fact that proper selection of cooperating nodes can offer local gains, as in the case of the proposed adaptation strategy, the global self-optimization of the system performance becomes realistically attainable.