Analysis of a Cooperative Strategy for a Large Decentralized Wireless Network

ANDRÉS ALTIERI; LEONARDO REY VEGA; PABLO PIANTANIDA; CECILIA G. GALARZA

IEEE-ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2014 vol. 22 p. 1039 - 1051

1063-6692

This paper investigates the benefits of cooperationand proposes a relay activation strategy for a large wirelessnetwork with multiple transmitters. In this framework, somenodes cooperate with a nearby node that acts as a relay, usingthe decode-and-forward protocol, and others use direct trans-mission. The network is modeled as an independently markedPoisson point process and the source nodes may choose theirrelays from the set of inactive nodes. Although cooperation canpotentially lead to significant improvements in the performanceof a communication pair, relaying causes additional interferencein the network, increasing the average noise that other nodes see.We investigate how source nodes should balance cooperation vs.interference to obtain reliable transmissions, and for this purposewe study and optimize a relay activation strategy with respect tothe outage probability. Surprisingly, in the high reliability regime,the optimized strategy consists on the activation of all the relaysor none at all, depending on network parameters. We providea simple closed-form expression that indicates when the relaysshould be active, and we introduce closed form expressions thatquantify the performance gains of this scheme with respect to anetwork that only uses direct transmission.