Cooperative Broadcast in Large-Scale Wireless Networks

An important property of the wireless medium is that the transmitted packets are heard not only by their intended recipients but also by otherneighboring nodes. In cooperative broadcast, the unintended messages are exploited in order to deliver a source message to the entire network with the help of relays. This is also known as physical layer cooperation. A fundamental problem in relay networks is determining the broadcast capacity, i.e. the maximum data transfer rate from a given node to every other node in the network. In this talk, we present results on the scaling of broadcast capacity for a network with a single source and multiple destinations/relays. The results are presented for high-density and extended networks under various channel models. This work quantifies thegains obtained due to cooperation compared to multi-hop non-cooperative broadcasting. This is joint work with Prof. Michael Gastpar (UC Berkeley).