Cooperative Strategies and Networks

Cooperative strategies and networks play an important role in current state-of-art wireless communications. The cooperation can have many forms and can be utilised at various levels of the processing hierarchy. At the physical layer, the cooperative algorithms revolutionise the design of modulation, coding, and signal processing. The Physical Layer Network Coding (PLNC) is concept of channel coding aware of the network structure and fully respecting all the aspect of the physical layer constellation space and channel parametrisation. PLNC-based communication networks deliver the information from sources to destinations through the complex relay network. The chapter addresses selected topics from PLNC technique ranging from the basic information-theoretic fundamental limits and concepts through particular design technique of network-coded modulation and finally including relay/destination decoding techniques. PLNC systems where the final destination has only imperfect/partial hierarchical side information require relay hierarchical maps with extended cardinality in order to guarantee the overall global solvability.