An ever-growing demand for higher data-rates has facilitated the growth of wireless networks in the past decades. These networks, however, are known to exhibit capacity and coverage problems, hence jeopardizing the promised quality of service towards the end-user. To overcome these problems, prohibitive investment costs in terms of base station or access point rollouts would be required if traditional, non-scalable, cell-splitting, and micro-cell capacity dimension procedures were applied. The prime aim of current R&D initiatives is, hence, to develop innovative network solutions that decrease the cost per bit/s/Hz over the wireless link. To this end, cooperative networks have emerged as an efficient and promising solution. We discuss in this chapter some key research and deployment issues, with emphasis on cooperative architectures, networking, and security solutions. We expose some motivations to use such networks, as well as latest state-of-the-art developments, open research challenges, and business models.
Solving sensor network coverage problems by distributed asynchronous actor-critic methods