Wireless Network-Level Partial Relay Cooperation: A Stable Throughput Analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stability and throughput benefits of partial relay cooperation in a two-node wireless network with flow control, demonstrating that partial cooperation improves or maintains system stability compared to no flow control.

Contribution

It provides an exact stability region characterization for a network with partial relay cooperation and flow control, highlighting the advantages over systems without flow control.

Findings

Partial relay cooperation enhances system stability.

Flow control improves throughput performance.

The stability region is exactly characterized.

Abstract

In this work, we study the benefit of partial relay cooperation. We consider a two-node system consisting of one source and one relay node transmitting information to a common destination. The source and the relay have external traffic and in addition, the relay is equipped with a flow controller to regulate the incoming traffic from the source node. The cooperation is performed at the network level. A collision channel with erasures is considered. We provide an exact characterization of the stability region of the system and we also prove that the system with partial cooperation is always better or at least equal to the system without the flow controller.