  Capacity gains from transmitter and receiver cooperation are compared in a
relay network where the cooperating nodes are close together. Under
quasi-static phase fading, when all nodes have equal average transmit power
along with full channel state information (CSI), it is shown that transmitter
cooperation outperforms receiver cooperation, whereas the opposite is true when
power is optimally allocated among the cooperating nodes but only CSI at the
receiver (CSIR) is available. When the nodes have equal power with CSIR only,
cooperative schemes are shown to offer no capacity improvement over
non-cooperation under the same network power constraint. When the system is
under optimal power allocation with full CSI, the decode-and-forward
transmitter cooperation rate is close to its cut-set capacity upper bound, and
outperforms compress-and-forward receiver cooperation. Under fast Rayleigh
fading in the high SNR regime, similar conclusions follow. Cooperative systems
provide resilience to fading in channel magnitudes; however, capacity becomes
more sensitive to power allocation, and the cooperating nodes need to be closer
together for the decode-and-forward scheme to be capacity-achieving. Moreover,
to realize capacity improvement, full CSI is necessary in transmitter
cooperation, while in receiver cooperation optimal power allocation is
essential.
