Design and Optimization of Cooperative Wireless Networks

With increasing usage of wireless networks, data traffic is rapidly increasing. For instance, cellular traffic is growing exponentially and it is expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. Thus device-to-device (D2D) networking/connections are promising to relieve traffic over traditional networks and improve throughput in wireless networks. Furthermore, such D2D connections could lead to applications such as (i) information gathering from sensor networks and detection in the fusion node, (ii) error recovery from the cellular links using D2D connection support, and (iii) cooperative computation in distributed systems. In particular, we solve the following problems in this thesis: (i) information gathering and detection in wireless sensor networks, (ii) content awareness for cooperative mobile devices that employ network coding, (iii) network coding design for multiple interfaces in cooperative mobile devices, and (iv) cooperative computation in heterogeneous wireless networks.