Direct Information Exchange in Wireless Networks: A Coding Perspective

The rise in the popularity of smartphones such as Blackberry and iPhone creates a strain on the world's mobile networks. The extensive use of these mobile devices leads to increasing congestion and higher rate of node failures. This increasing demand of mobile wireless clients forces network providers to upgrade their wireless networks with more efficient and more reliable services to meet the demands of their customers. Therefore, there is a growing interest in strategies to resolve the problem and reduce the stress on the wireless networks. One strategy to reduce the strain on the wireless networks is to utilize cooperative communication. The purpose of this thesis is to provide more efficient and reliable solutions for direct information exchange problems. First, algorithms are presented to increase the efficiency of cooperative communication in a network where the clients can communicate with each other through a broadcast channel. These algorithms are designed to minimize the total transmission cost so that the communication will be less expensive and more efficient. Second, we consider a setting in which several clients exchange data through a relay. Our algorithms have provable performance guarantees. We also verify the performance of the algorithms in practical settings through extensive simulations.