SPACE-TIME communication is a technique that leverages the spatial and temporal variations of the channel to significantly enhance the performance of wireless networks. This communication paradigm can be realized using multiple antenna element arrays where the antenna elements are separated sufficiently (of the order of the wavelength of the carrier used) such that the channel fading of each antenna is independent. Depending on the number of cooperating nodes used at the transmitting and receiving ends of a link, a virtual MISO (VMISO), virtual SIMO (VSIMO), or virtual MIMO (VMIMO) link can be established. VMISO allows improved data rates, the coordination overhead and complexity of channel state information and processing are significant challenges in VMIMO which do not affect VMISO. The VMISO is an essential step toward realizing VMIMO and the principles developed in this work can be used as a building block for realizing various distributed space-time communication approaches. Joint throughput-hop distance optimization for VMISO routing. The importance of jointly optimizing the link rate and the hop distance to achieve performance improvements using VMISO transmissions. Cluster size determination. The majority of the works involving smart antennas or distributed space-time communication. Strategies for routing. The identify several approaches for adapting the rate, range, and cluster size and establish the limitations of each of them. The insights are used to identify the best approach to joint optimization of all three parameters and incorporated in a routing protocol. Cooperative transmissions provide fundamental improvements to multihop routing performance in wireless networks in terms of better scalability with both hop length and flows compared to existing wireless technologies. Realizing cooperative routing with multiple flows is nontrivial due to inherent tradeoffs between improving a single flow’s performance and the interference among flows.