The objective of this research is to formulate theories and techniques for a new communication paradigm of cooperative detection. This approach leverages cooperation among destination nodes during detection. The approach is to utilize the fact that wireless signals intended for one node are also overheard by neighboring nodes, thus a cluster of adjacent nodes can cooperatively recover the original information by exploiting spatial signal correlation through game theoretic information sharing and distributed source-channel coding.
With respect to intellectual merit, this work seeks to increase network throughput and reliability through the use of cooperative detection. Existing research on cooperative communication is dominated by a focus on cooperative transmission, which relies on coordination among transmitters to achieve specific signal structure at receivers. Cooperative detection, as investigated in this project, instead exploits the intrinsic signal correlation among neighboring receivers without requiring explicit coordination among transmitters. It enables a family of communication techniques that have the potential to be inherently robust against the lack of precise coordination and to fully exploit the spatial diversity inherent in wireless networks.
With respect to broader impact, this research has the potential to close the gap between theoretical network capacity and practical achievable throughput and to accelerate the deployment of high data rate reliable wireless networks to a variety of operational scenarios. The project provides research experiences for undergraduate students and interactive demonstrations to students from underrepresented groups during department open house and site visits to minority serving institutions.
