We investigate a cross-layer communication technique which jointly lever-
ages diversity gain from cooperative communications relaying and optimal
throughput characteristics of backpressure networking. In particular, we
address the capacity limitations of backpressure networks within fading en-
vironments by the retasking of a cooperating node as a relay with potentially
heterogeneous transmission architecture. Retasking a node as a cooperative
relay can temporally allocate resources of one particular session within the
backpressure network onto another session, thereby allowing for a more flex-
ible physical (PHY) layer for traffic load balancing. With this, we derive a
scheduling method that ensures timely delivery of information in networks
without predetermined infrastructure.
Within this thesis, we propose the architecture of an amplify-and-forward
relay for cooperative communications and derive the performance of multi-
ple cooperative nodes utilizing this architecture. We also propose a suitable
medium access control (MAC) layer facilitating the scheduling and decision
making of nearby relay node candidates. The proposed architecture may be of potential interest for emerging device-to-device (D2D) and swarming mesh
networks
