Uncoordinated Cooperative Communications With Spatially Random Relays

In the traditional cooperative communication scenario, coordination is required among relay nodes to help data transmission through distributed signal transmission or coding techniques. For large cooperative networks, the overhead for coordination is huge and the synchronization among relays is very difficult. In this paper, the authors propose uncoordinated cooperative communication strategies in a large wireless network that do not need the coordination among relays while realizing cooperative diversity for the source-destination link. Without a central controller, all relays that are spatially randomly placed contend for the channel to relay the packet from source to destination in a distributed fashion.