Performance of Random Relaying of MDS Codeword Blocks in Cooperative Multi - Hop Networks over Random Error Channels

Abstract—We propose random relaying of MDS codeword blocks in cooperative multi-hop networks and evaluate its performance over random error channels by means of an absorbing Markov chain. The proposed scheme can apply to cooperative multi-hop networks with the arbitrary number of relay nodes at each hop stage and require no feedback channels between nodes. In the proposed scheme, a message block is encoded by a MDS code of coding rate 1 / L , where L is an integer. A relay node partitions a codeword of the MDS code into L blocks and transmits one randomly selected codeword block. When each relay node receives two or more codeword blocks of the MDS code, it aggregates the blocks, corrects channel errors with the aid of the MDS code or its punctured code. Numerical results indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by incorporating random relaying of MDS codeword blocks.