The document is an abstract for a PhD thesis on cooperative communications over wireless relay channels. It discusses analyzing relay channels from an information-theoretic and communication-theoretic perspective, including single-input single-output and multiple-input multiple-output relay channels. For MIMO relay channels, it focuses on two-hop channels using orthogonal space-time block coding at the relay in Rayleigh fading. It derives approximations for error probability and outage probability for amplify-and-forward relaying, and expressions for ergodic and outage capacity.