A comparison of cooperative beamforming to direct transmission based on spectral efficiency

We recently proposed a cross-layer cooperative beamforming approach for transmitting signals of competing users to a far away destination in an energy efficient fashion. This was a two-stage scheme that relied on cooperating nodes to appropriately weight and forward the received signal, so that the signal of a particular node adds coherently at its destination only. In this paper we propose a variant of our previous approach that achieves maximum spectral efficiency. We compare the performance of the proposed approach to existing ones, in order to determine the best transmission scheme given certain network parameters, such as number of sources, number of cooperating nodes, power budgets and path loss.