Multi-Source Cooperative Communication with Opportunistic Interference Cancelling Relays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-user cooperative wireless protocol utilizing opportunistic interference cancellation at relays, enhancing diversity and multiplexing gains without network synchronization, supported by analytical models and simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cooperative protocol with SIC at relays, enabling improved performance and relay pre-selection without network synchronization.

Findings

Enhanced diversity and multiplexing gains demonstrated.

Analytical outage probability model developed.

Performance surpasses orthogonal and multi-user protocols.

Abstract

In this paper we present a multi-user cooperative protocol for wireless networks. Two sources transmit simultaneously their information blocks and relays employ opportunistically successive interference cancellation (SIC) in an effort to decode them. An adaptive decode/amplify-and-forward scheme is applied at the relays to the decoded blocks or their sufficient statistic if decoding fails. The main feature of the protocol is that SIC is exploited in a network since more opportunities arise for each block to be decoded as the number of used relays NRU is increased. This feature leads to benefits in terms of diversity and multiplexing gains that are proven with the help of an analytical outage model and a diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) analysis. The performance improvements are achieved without any network synchronization and coordination. In the final part of this work the closed-form outage probability model is used by a novel approach for offline pre-selection of the NRU relays, that have the best SIC performance, from a larger number of NR nodes. The analytical results are corroborated with extensive simulations, while the protocol is compared with orthogonal and multi-user protocols reported in the literature.