Wideband Multi-user Cooperative Networks: Theory and Measurements

This book details promising communication schemes and channel modeling for a pervasive wireless access network (PWAN). Such a network is formed by nodes equipped with heterogeneous antenna arrangements and placed up to 10 m apart from each other. Nodes can be static when they belong to the infrastructure or have limited mobility when they are carried by a person. This scenario is extremely interesting for relay-based applications and fills the gap between the body area network that has a coverage up to 1 m and the wireless local area network that has a coverage up to 100 m. When a PWAN is jointly considered with high node density, it allows for node cooperations, and idle or infrastructure nodes can support the communication of source-destination pairs. With an adequate signaling scheme, the PWAN can operate as a virtual antenna array and ultimately achieve multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) gains in a distributed way. Until now these networks have been studied using oversimplified channel models that were frequency flat and designed for cellular low node density networks. The novelty of this book is the study of a PWAN under realistic channel conditions and hardware constraints.