A Unified Cross-Layer Framework for Resource Allocation in Cooperative Networks

Node cooperation is an emerging and powerful solution that can overcome the limitation of wireless systems as well as improve the capacity of the next generation wireless networks. By forming a virtual antenna array, node cooperation can achieve high antenna and diversity gains by using several partners to relay the transmitted signals. There has been a lot of work on improving the link performance in cooperative networks by using advanced signal processing or power allocation methods among a single source node and its relays. However, the resource allocation among multiple nodes has not received much attention yet. In this paper, we present a unified cross- layer framework for resource allocation in cooperative networks, which considers the physical and network layers jointly and can be applied for any cooperative transmission scheme. It is found that the fairness and energy constraint cannot be satisfied simultaneously if each node uses a fixed set of relays. To solve this problem, a multi-state cooperation methodology is proposed, where the energy is allocated among the nodes state-by-state via a geometric and network decomposition approach. Given the energy allocation, the duration of each state is then optimized so as to maximize the nodes utility. Numerical results will compare the performance of cooperative networks with and without resource allocation for cooperative beamforming and selection relaying. It is shown that without resource allocation, cooperation will result in a poor lifetime of the heavily-used nodes. In contrast, the proposed framework will not only guarantee fairness, but will also provide significant throughput and diversity gain over conventional cooperation schemes.