Introduction

Background. The degrees of freedom introduced by multiple antennas at the transmitters and receivers of wireless communication systems facilitate multiplexing gains and diversity gains. A wireless point-to-point link with M transmit and N receive antennas constitutes an M-by-N multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. The ergodic capacity of an M-by-N MIMO fading channel increases almost linearly with min{M,N} provided that the fading meets certain mild conditions. Hence, it is not surprising that MIMO has attracted a lot of research interest since it enables significant performance and throughput gains without requiring extra transmit power and bandwidth. However, limitations on the number of antennas that a wireless device is able to support as well as the significant signal processing power and complexity required in MIMO tranceivers limit the gains that can be achieved in practice.

To overcome the limitations of traditional MIMO, the concept of cooperative communication has been proposed for wireless networks such as fixed infrastructure cellular networks and wireless ad-hoc networks. The basic idea of cooperative communication is that the single-antenna terminals of a multiuser system can share their antennas and create a virtual MIMO communication system. Thereby, three different types of cooperation may be distinguished, namely, user cooperation, base station (BS) cooperation, and relaying. Theoretically, user cooperation and BS cooperation are able to provide huge performance gains, when compared with noncooperative networks. However, the required information exchange between users and BSs may make these options less attractive in practice.