With the popularity of wireless devices and the increase of computing and storage resources, there are increasing interests in supporting mobile computing techniques. Particularly, ad hoc networks can potentially connect different wireless devices to enable more powerful wireless applications and mobile computing capabilities. To meet the ever increasing communication need, it is important to improve the network throughput while guaranteeing transmission reliability. Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology can provide significantly higher data rate in ad hoc networks where nodes are equipped with multiantenna arrays. Although MIMO technique itself can support diversity transmission when channel condition degrades, the use of diversity transmission often compromises the multiplexing gain and is also not enough to deal with extremely weak channel. Instead, in this work, we exploit the use of cooperative relay transmission (which is often used in a single antenna environment to ...