Information Theoretical Limits on Cooperative Communications

This chapter provides an overview of the information theoretic foundations of cooperative communications. Earlier information theoretic achievements as well as the more recent developments are discussed. The analysis accounts for full/half-duplex nodes, and for multiple relays. Various channel models such as discrete memoryless, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channels are considered. Cooperative communication protocols are investigated using capacity, diversity and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) as performance metrics. Overall, this chapter provides a comprehensive view on the foundations of, and the state-of-the-art reached in the theory of cooperative communications.