Cooperative MIMO based cellular networks: A comprehensive survey

Recently, there has been increasing interest in integrating multi-hop relaying functionalities into cellular wireless networks. Multi-hop cellular networks can potentially enhance coverage, data rates, and QoS performance. Cooperative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the cooperative schemes adopted in multi-hop cellular network. Cooperative MIMO technology allows a wireless network to coordinate among distributed antennas and achieve considerable performance gains also it promises significant improvements in spectral efficiency and network coverage. In-depth investigations and careful system designs are required to exploit the potential advantages in Cooperative MIMO based multi-hop cellular network. This paper presents a review of the existing work in this area and pointing out the key research issues.