CONET

Cooperative wireless communications and networking is emerging as a promising technology to enhance system performance by sharing resources among wireless nodes. With cooperation at all layers of the protocol stack, the wireless network can achieve higher throughput, higher system reliability, higher energy efficiency, lower bit-error rate, and smaller packet loss rate. A variety of research in recent years have actively focused on design, simulation, modeling, and applying cooperative communications in wireless ad hoc, mesh, and sensor networks, etc. International standards organizations have been initialized various activities to apply cooperation mechanisms in the wireless LAN, PAN and MAN. For instance, the IEEE 802.16j working group is actively calling for contributions for relay metropolitan networks.

The idea of cooperative wireless communications and networking can be tracked back to the work of the theoretic properties of relay channels. By sharing antennas in a multi-user environment, single-antenna wireless devices enable a virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system that allows them to achieve transmit diversity, and hence obtain advantages of MIMO with reduced size, cost, and complexity of the hardware/software. Upon cooperation at physical, MAC, network, and application layer, various cooperative signaling methods are widely explored and many new mechanisms are under development with respects to routing, medium access, location management, scheduling, energy management, and so on.

This workshop intends to bring together researchers, engineers, and students to present new results, describe work in progress, and explore relationships among their diverse approaches