Protocol-Level Cooperation in Wireless Networks: Stable Throughput and Delay Analysis

The authors study the impact of user cooperation in wireless networks on improving the stable throughput and delay performance. Specifically, they consider a multi-access system in which a set of source users generate packets to deliver to a common destination. A cooperation strategy is proposed at the protocol level, where users with a better channel to the destination have the option to relay packets from users that are farther afield. For the case of erasure channels with single-packet reception, they derive the stable throughput regions under different multiple access policies based on such cooperation strategy.