Aspects of cross-layer design in autonomic cooperative networking

Both cooperative transmission and autonomic networking have emerged recently as very promising technologies ready to become the key components of network of the future. Cooperative transmission capitalises on the exploitation of radio channel diversity provided by additional relay nodes forming virtual antenna arrays. Especially in dense set-ups, there appears an urgent need for the exploitation of the network layer routines for the purposes of organising many potentially concurrent cooperative and non-cooperative transmissions. Finally, complex network configurations require the incorporation of self-management so the system can behave autonomically as if it was imitating the processes driving real living organisms. All these aspects induce certain cross-layer elements into the overall system design to be discussed in this paper.