This book focuses on cooperative communications within and between clusters of wireless devices and develops a new framework for resolving and improving aspects of large-scale networks distributed in a vast geographical region such as synchronization, power management, interference mitigation, and resource management. In our framework, a cluster is a group of nodes that are connected to each other via wireless links that fulfill certain minimum threshold of bitrate. A class of gossip propagation called consensus protocol is adopted as cooperative algorithm to improve the overall behavior of the wireless devices. The transmit diversity (spatial diversity) is introduced to enable the system to use signal power for inter-cluster communications as low as noise power level. The proposed framework uses a 3GPP LTE-Advanced compliant. At the end, a new protocol stack and device structure is proposed for wireless nodes.
