Pushed by the demand for high bandwidth multimedia and intense internet related wireless services, communication engineers seek to exploit at full the spectral resources in cellular networks, in all available dimensions: time, frequency, code and space.
As the many radio links sharing the resource in the network can no longer be treated as independent, the classical approach of individually optimizing communication over the point-to point channels between a Mobile Station (MS) and a Base Station (BS), using say advanced codes, or single-link Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) must be revisited, to offer a truly multi-terminal view of the network. At the core of this view, lies the notion of cooperative communication, which can take place between BSs, or even between the MSs themselves.
Learning from lessons from the ad-hoc wireless networking community, where cooperation heavily builds on the concept of relaying, cooperative communication now finds its way into the cellular network framework, notably as a way to deal with multi-cell interference using distributed MIMO concepts.
This paper presents an overview of the developments in this research field.