  We consider a wireless network composed of three nodes and limited by the
half-duplex and total power constraints. This formulation encompasses many of
the special cases studied in the literature and allows for capturing the common
features shared by them. Here, we focus on three special cases, namely 1) Relay
Channel, 2) Multicast Channel, and 3) Conference Channel. These special cases
are judicially chosen to reflect varying degrees of complexity while
highlighting the common ground shared by the different variants of the three
node wireless network. For the relay channel, we propose a new cooperation
scheme that exploits the wireless feedback gain. This scheme combines the
benefits of decode-and-forward and compress-and-forward strategies and avoids
the idealistic feedback assumption adopted in earlier works. Our analysis of
the achievable rate of this scheme reveals the diminishing feedback gain at
both the low and high signal-to-noise ratio regimes. Inspired by the proposed
feedback strategy, we identify a greedy cooperation framework applicable to
both the multicast and conference channels. Our performance analysis reveals
several nice properties of the proposed greedy approach and the central role of
cooperative source-channel coding in exploiting the receiver side information
in the wireless network setting. Our proofs for the cooperative multicast with
side-information rely on novel nested and independent binning encoders along
with a list decoder.
