Strategies and Tradeoffs for Coded Cooperation in Wireless Networks

In a wireless network, fading significantly affects the performance, and diversity techniques are used to overcome this issue. Cooperation among nodes provides spatial diversity by means of packet relaying. In coded cooperation, diversity is further enhanced since cooperating nodes transmit different parts of a coded packet on different channels. In this paper the authors analyze various combinations of coded cooperation with a Hybrid Automatic Retransmission reQuest (HARQ) algorithm. The authors assume the use of a capacity-achieving code, so that an outage event occurs when the total transmission rate exceeds the channel capacity.