This dissertation focuses on an efficient cooperative communication method for wireless ad hoc networks. Typically, performance enhancement via cooperative communications can be achieved at the cost of other system resources such as additional bandwidth, transmit power, or more complex synchronization methods between cooperating signals. However, the proposed ooperative transmission scheme in this research utilizes system resources more efficiently by reducing the redundant and wasteful cooperating signals typically required, while maintaining the desired performance improvement.

There are four main results in this dissertation. First, an efficient cooperative retransmission scheme is introduced to increase bandwidth efficiency by reducing wasteful cooperating signals. The proposed cooperative transmission method does not require any additional information for cooperation. Furthermore, we ensure good quality for the cooperating signals through a simple yet effective selection procedure. Multiple cooperating nodes can be involved in the cooperation without prior planning via distributed beamforming. The proposed cooperative retransmission scheme outperforms traditional retransmission by the source as well as other cooperative methods in terms of delay and packet error rate (PER).

Secondly, the outage probabilities of the cooperative retransmission scheme are analyzed for both the perfect synchronization case and when offset estimation is performed for distributed beamforming. The performance with offset estimation is close to the perfect synchronization case, especially for short data packets. A low-rate feedback channel is introduced to adjust the phase shift due to channel variation and the residual frequency offset. It is shown that substantial gain can be achieved with a low-rate feedback channel, even for long data packets.

Third, the throughput efficiency and average packet delay of the proposed cooperative retransmission scheme are analyzed using a two-state Markov model for both a simple automatic repeat request (ARQ) and a hybrid ARQ technique. The benefits of the cooperative ARQ approach are also verified in a multihop network with random configurations when there are concurrent packet transmissions. The average transmit power for the cooperating signals is also investigated in the proposed cooperative transmission scheme with various power control approaches. Finally, cooperative multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems are examined, mainly focusing on power allocation methods to increase overall channel capacity. An efficient and simple power allocation method at the cooperating node is proposed which can be used for an arbitrary number of antennas without any additional information.