Lower Bound of Energy-Delay Tradeoff of Cooperative MIMO Communications

Cooperative MIMO (CMIMO) communications have transformed channel fading from a negative factor that should be mitigated into a positive factor that can be exploited in wireless networks to improve capacity. Meanwhile, CMIMO scheme has been proved to be an effective solution to improve the energy efficiency of a network. However, an inherent feature of wireless channels, unreliability caused by channel fading is neglected in related studies. In this paper, on the basis of an unreliable link model, the trade-off between the energy consumption and the transmission delay of CMIMO scheme is investigated from the viewpoint of cross-layer, and a lower bound of energy-delay tradeoff is provided which offers a deep insight into the benefits of CMIMO compared with classical multi-hop communications. Moreover, a cross-layer framework is introduced to optimize the parameters at the physical and protocol layers.