Signal acquisition for cooperative transmissions in multi-hop ad-hoc networks

Cooperative transmission schemes in multi-hop networks have the advantage of energy efficiency and increased network coverage. Realizing these advantages, however, require a compatible physical layer. In this paper we consider the detection of a signal transmitted by multiple cooperative nodes. Exploiting the structure of the network, we formulate the problem, and propose a generalized likelihood ratio detector. We compare the performance of the proposed detector with two others: estimator-correlator and a genie aided detector (provides a performance benchmark). The genie aided detector assumes the knowledge of certain network parameters which may be unknown during reception. Simulations show that the proposed detector performs reasonably close to the genie aided one, while being considerably better than the estimator-correlator.