Signal acquisition for cooperative transmissions in multi-hop ad-hoc networks

Cooperative transmission schemes in multi-hop networks have the advantage of energy efficiency and increased network coverage. Realizing these advantages, however, requires a compatible physical layer. We consider the detection of a signal transmitted by multiple cooperative nodes. Exploiting the structure of the network, we formulate the problem, and propose a generalized likelihood ratio detector. We compare the performance of the proposed detector with two others: estimator-correlator and a genie-aided detector (provides a performance benchmark). The genie-aided detector assumes the knowledge of certain network parameters which may be unknown during reception. Simulations show that the proposed detector performs reasonably close to the genie-aided one, while being considerably better than the estimator-correlator.