With a rapid growth of high data rate applications such as wireless video, there are growing demands of wireless bandwidth which is limited due to the imperfect nature of wireless medium and its unpredictable dynamics. In recent years, the cooperative communication has become a promising approach to cope with the fading of wireless channels by combining existing benefits of spatial diversity in MIMO system with practical considerations. In fact, cooperative wireless networking has gained popularity with rich features for future wireless systems. Although the research community already has a good understanding of such a physical layer technique, it is still not clear how the node cooperation can be leveraged toward improving the performance gain at the MAC and networking layers. In this monograph, the performance of this important communication paradigm is analyzed and modeled from different perspectives and in different communication layers.
