Improving Connectivity in Wireless Network Through Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communication (CC) is a technique that has been explored as an alternative to connect isolated network components in wireless ad hoc settings. However, existing solutions are centralized and have high computational cost, as they require complete topology information. This paper presents a distributed solution to improve network connectivity by exploring CC using localized information. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to restore connectivity in more than 95% of the evaluated cases. Furthermore, transmission power needed to establish the CC is comparable to the cost of similar solutions that require global topological information.