Design of a new scheme for multi-hop wireless networks using decode-and-forward strategy

This paper proposes a Decode-and-Forward (DF) relaying scheme for the multi-hop transmission in wireless networks, where the information generated by an independent source has to be sent to a far destination based on multiple-relay cooperation. The proposed DF scheme blends together convolutional channel coding with linear combination of blocks of data over a finite field using very short block lengths (K = 13). We provide an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis to understand the good performance behavior of the proposed scheme when compared with other referenced schemes using much larger block lengths. This fact is corroborated by a set of Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, the proposed DF scheme is suitable for large multi-hop networks since a negligible performance degradation is obtained when adding more hops.