An automatic repeat request protocol for cooperative slotted radio networks

In conventional (non-cooperative) radio networks, the data frames, that are corrupted by errors during the transmission in a fading environment, are retransmitted by the source. In cooperative radio networks, frame retransmission may be performed by a neighboring node that has successfully overheard the source’s frame transmission. The advantage of the latter is the spatial diversity that is provided by the cooperative node. In addition, the retransmitted frame may have incremental redundancy for improved performance. In this paper a simple automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol is specified that takes advantage of coded cooperative communication in slotted, single-hop radio networks. An exact analytical formulation is presented to compute the delay experienced by Poisson arriving frames whose retransmission (when needed) is performed by one cooperative node. The study reports significant quantitative advantages of the coded cooperation ARQ protocol in terms of both throughput and latency, when compared to non-cooperative ARQ protocols.