Cooperation in Wireless Networks: Principles and Applications covers the underlying principles of cooperative techniques as well as several applications demonstrating the use of such techniques in practical systems. The work is written in a collaborative manner by several authors from Asia, America, and Europe. Twenty chapters introduce and discuss in detail the main cooperative strategies for the whole communication protocol stack from the application layer down to the physical layer. Furthermore power saving strategies, security, hardware realization, and user scenarios for cooperative communication systems are introduced and discussed. The book also summarizes the strength of cooperation for upcoming generation of wireless communication systems, clearly motivating the use of cooperative techniques and pointing out that cooperation will become one of the key technologies enabling 4G and beyond. This book puts into one volume a comprehensive and technically rich view of the wireless communications scene from a cooperation point of view.

Cooperation has been the subject of intensive study in the social and biological sciences, as well as in mathematics and artificial intelligence. The fundamental finding is that even egoists can sustain cooperation provided the structure of their environment allows for repeated interactions (Axelrod 1984).

Some truly remarkable illustrations of this principle have recently appeared in the realm of information systems. One example is the success of open source (Axelrod and Cohen, 1999; Weber 2005) in which thousands of people cooperate to build a system, such as Linux. Another example is the success of eBay which is based on a feedback system that allows strangers to trust each other based upon the validity of the reputations for cooperating with others in the past. Still another example is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, and which by means of peer cooperation attains remarkable coverage and quality.

Wireless networks provide yet another realm in which cooperation among large numbers of egoists can be attained, provided that the right institutional structure can designed and implemented.Wireless communications is a rapidly emerging area of technology. Its success will depend in large measure on whether self-interested individuals can be provided a structure in which they are proper incentives to act in a cooperative mode. The editors and contributors to Cooperation in Wireless Networks demonstrate that our understanding of how cooperation works in a variety of other realms can illuminate what it will take for wireless technology to realize its full potential.