"A self-contained guide to the state-of-the-art in cooperative communications and networking techniques for next generation cellular wireless systems, this comprehensive book provides a succinct understanding of the theory, fundamentals and techniques involved in achieving efficient cooperative wireless communications in cellular wireless networks. It consolidates the essential information, addressing both theoretical and practical aspects of cooperative communications and networking in the context of cellular design. This one-stop resource covers the basics of cooperative communications techniques for cellular systems, advanced transceiver design, relay-based cellular networks, and game-theoretic and micro-economic models for protocol design in cooperative cellular wireless networks. Details of ongoing standardization activities are also included. With contributions from experts in the field divided into five distinct sections, this easy-to-follow book delivers the background needed to develop and implement cooperative mechanisms for cellular wireless networks"-- "The systematic study of relaying and cooperation in the context of digital communication goes back to the work of Van der Meulen [1] and Cover and El Gamal [2]. The basic relay channel of [1, 2] consists of a source, a destination, and a relay node. The system models in [1, 2] are either discrete memoryless channels (DMC), or continuous-valued channels which are characterized by constant (nonrandom) links and additive white Gaussian noise. The study of cooperative wireless communication is a more recent activity that started in the late 1990s, and since then has seen explosive growth in many directions. Our focus is specifically on aspects of cooperative communication related to cellular radio. Aside from the fading model, the defining aspects of a cellular system are: base stations that are connected to an infrastructure known as the backhaul, which has a much higher capacity and better reliability than the wireless links. The endpoints of the system are mobiles that operate subject to energy constraints (battery) as well as constraints driven by the physical size of the device that lead to bounds on computational complexity and the number of antennas, among other considerations"--