IEEE Communications Magazine

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Advances in Cooperative and Relay Communications

In wireless networks, relays have been traditionally used to extend the range of communication systems. However, in recent years, other applications of relay communications have emerged. One such emerging application is to assist in the communication between the source and destination via some cooperation protocol. By controlling medium access between source and relays coupled with the appropriate modulation or coding in such cooperative schemes, it has been found that the diversity of the system can be improved. In multi-user systems, different users can also act as cooperative partners or relays to share resources and assist each other in information transmission, thereby creating a cooperative network. One other emerging application is the exchange of information between multiple users through relay(s). In such cases, by exploiting the knowledge of one's own transmitted signal, the throughput of these systems can be drastically increased.

For cooperative and relay communications, the MAC layer also has many unique features. The MAC in this case, is concerned with more than one hop communication, is distributed and cooperative and works for multipoint-to-multipoint communication. The MAC also needs to have knowledge about network topology and account for node mobility. Accordingly, a new design of the MAC layer has to be devised to include new functionalities as well as MAC layer routing.

With the large benefits to be reaped from employing cooperative and relay techniques, several standardization groups, such as IEEE 802.16 and IEEE 802.11, have started standardization processes to include such technologies into their prevailing standards. These efforts will no doubt attract even more interests from the academia and industry, advancing cooperative and relay technologies even further in the coming years.

With interests from both the research and industrial communities gaining momentum, there is an urgent need to better understand as well as to keep track of cutting edge research in cooperative and relay communications. We plan this special issue to help address that need, as well as to help researchers looking to jump on the bandwagon. Therefore, the special issue will focus on recent advances as well as survey papers in cooperative and relay communications. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following topics:

Schedule
Full manuscript due: June 1, 2008
Acceptance notification: October 1, 2008
Final manuscript due: December 1, 2008
Publication date: February 2009

Submission
Authors must follow the IEEE Communications Magazine's guidelines for preparation of the manuscript. Complete guidelines for prospective authors can be found at www.comsoc.org/pubs/commag/sub_guidelines.html. All articles to be considered for publication must be submitted through Manuscript Central (http://commag-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com/). Choose "February 2009/Cooperative and Relay Communications" from the drop down menu.

Guest Editors
Woon Hau Chin
Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
w.h.chin@ieee.org

Yi Qian
National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
yqian@nist.gov

Giovanni Giambene
University of Siena, Italy
giambene@unisi.it