CARDONE Martina

A uniform mobile user quality of service and a distributed use of the spectrum represent the key-ingredients for next generation cellular networks. Toward this end, physical layer cooperation among the network infrastructure and the wireless nodes has emerged as a potential technique. Cooperation leverages the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, that is, the same transmission can be heard by multiple nodes, thus opening up the possibility that nodes help one another to convey the messages to their intended destination. Cooperation also promises to offer novel and smart ways to manage interference, instead of just simply disregarding it and treating it as noise. Understanding how to properly design such cooperative wireless systems so that the available resources are fully utilized is of fundamental importance.

The objective of this thesis is to conduct an information theoretic study on practically relevant wireless systems where the network infrastructure nodes cooperate among themselves in an attempt to enhance the network performance in many critical aspects, such as throughput, robustness and coverage. Wireless systems with half-duplex relay stations as well as scenarios where a base station overhears another base station and consequently helps serving this other base station's associated mobile users, represent the wireless cooperative networks under investigation in this thesis. The prior focus is to make progress towards characterizing the capacity of such wireless systems by means of derivation of novel outer bounds and design of new provably optimal transmission strategies.