Achievable Communication Rates in Ad hoc Wireless Networks Using Local Node Cooperation

We consider two strategies for communication in ad hoc networks with local node cooperation. Groups of adjacent nodes transmit and relay information simultaneously in order to increase the throughput. For the proposed schemes we derive achievability bounds on the communication rates and demonstrate sizable gains over the corresponding time division multiple access based strategies. The obtained bounds closely follow recently derived information theoretic upper bounds on communication rates. Additionally we address the impact of traffic localization on the achievable rates and the receiver complexity.