Introduction

Abstract

Nowadays, as research is being advanced very rapidly, more and more complex solutions are continually devised. There is, in fact, an urgent drive for the development of a flexible networked system, comprising a number of different transmission technologies and able to self-manage, such that seamless, on-demand service provision could be offered to the end users. This book makes an attempt to present a consolidated analysis of the evolution of certain aspects of such a system. In particular, it provides an incremental description of the development of Autonomic Cooperative Networking, starting from spatio-temporal processing and its translation into cooperative transmission in ad hoc environments. Following, routing related enhancements are proposed and the whole solution is positioned under the umbrella of autonomic system design. Then, the investigated concept is extended to autonomic cooperative deployments in relay enhanced cellular systems and, eventually, it is put in the context of emergency communications.