Performance of Random Relaying of MDS Codeword Blocks in Cooperative Multi-Hop Networks Over Random Error Channels

The authors propose random relaying of MDS codeword blocks in cooperative multi-hop networks and evaluate its performance over random error channels by means of an absorbing Markov chain. The proposed scheme can apply to cooperative multi-hop networks with the arbitrary number of relay nodes at each hop stage and require no feedback channels between nodes. In the proposed scheme, a message block is encoded by a MDS code of coding rate 1 / L, where L is an integer. A relay node partitions a codeword of the MDS code into L blocks and transmits one randomly selected codeword block.