Incremental Redundancy Cooperative Coding for Wireless Networks: Cooperative Diversity, Coding, and Transmission Energy Gain

We study an incremental redundancy (IR) cooperative coding scheme for wireless networks. To exploit the spatial diversity benefit we propose a cluster-based collaborating strategy for a quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel model and based on a network geometric distance profile. Our scheme enhances the network performance by embedding an IR cooperative coding scheme into an existing noncooperative route. More precisely, for each hop, we form a collaborating cluster of M−1 nodes between the (hop) sender and the (hop) destination. The transmitted message is encoded using a mother code and partitioned into M blocks corresponding to the each of M slots. In the first slot, the (hop) sender broadcasts its information by transmitting the first block, and its helpers attempt to relay this message. In the remaining slots, the each of left-over M −1 blocks is sent either through a helper which has successfully decoded the message or directly by the (hop) sender where a dynamic schedule is based on the ACK-based feedback from the cluster. By employing powerful good codes (e.g., turbo codes, LDPC codes, and raptor codes) whose performance is characterized by a threshold behavior, our approach improves the reliability of a multi-hop routing through not only cooperation diversity benefit but also a coding advantage. The study of the diversity and the coding gain of the proposed scheme is based on a simple threshold bound on the frame-error rate (FER) of maximum likelihood decoding. A average FER upper bound and its asymptotic (in large SNR) version are derived as a function of the average fading channel SNRs and the code threshold. Based on asymptotic bounds, we investigate both the diversity, coding, and transmission energy gain in the high and moderate SNR regime for three different scenarios: cooperative transmission, cooperative reception, and cluster hopping. Furthermore, given a geometric distance profile of the network, these bounds guide to the design of the collaborating cluster and the IR cooperation scheme.