Cooperative communications constitute a new access scheme that tends to substitute traditional contention schemes for accessing the medium. The idea is to exploit the broadcast nature of wireless networks through retransmission of overhead information towards the destination, aiming at better performance as a result of spatial diversity. Initial research results are very promising, but are solely based on information theoretic models and simulations. These models involve simplifying assumptions and raise concerns as for the efficiency of the scheme in a real environment.

In CoopLab we plan to implement representative cooperative scenarios and study their performance in real-life wireless testbeds. The experiments will take place in already existing wireless testbeds of the partners. These will be federated under a common management frameworks and a special component of this framework will be developed to support experimentation in cooperative communications.

Project's website: http://cooplab-ict.eu/