TABLE OF CONTENTS The information signals flow through telecommunication networks through paths that depend on nodes location, traffic, etc. The routing problem has been typically formulated as the problem of finding the best path from the source to the destination. This formulation is perfectly reasonable, but it is somehow biased by the fact that the initial research in this field assumed the network to be wired. A wireless network has certainly its own problems, due primarily to the randomness of the links, but it offers, at the same time, a greater flexibility in designing the most appropriate routing strategy than wired networks. In wireless networks, in fact, the information packets might go from the source to the destination following more paths, at the same time. With a wireless network, we can think of the information emanating from the source as an information wave that propagates through a medium composed of many nodes that can, in principle, retransmit the received information at the same time. Clearly, these simultaneous paths create also interference. However, if the cooperating nodes retransmit the information in a coordinated manner, the potential interference can be turned into a constructive interference that can improve the link performance.
Multihop radio networking is a field whose study started long time ago (see [1] and the references therein). Some basic theorems on the capacity of relaying networks were established in [2, 3, 4, 5], for example. More recently, the interest about relaying networks, especially in the form of cooperation...
