Patent ID: 8902737

Claim:
A method of forwarding in a cooperative network, comprising a plurality of nodes including a source terminal, a destination terminal, and at least one relay terminal, a data packet being transmitted by the source terminal to the destination terminal via at least said relay terminal, the method comprising: determining whether the data packet can be decoded without errors by the destination terminal and, if not, a determination is made whether at least one transmission channel routing said packet between at least one node, which is one of the source terminal and the relay terminal, and said destination terminal is in an outage state, the outage state occurring when a bit rate (R) on a channel is higher than the instantaneous mutual information (I) on the channel, and that: when said channel is in an outage state, said node, which originally transmitted the packet over the at least one transmission channel, retransmits the packet using a different transmission resource or a modulation and coding scheme with lower spectral efficiency than the one used by this node in the preceding transmission of said packet; and when said channel is not in an outage state, said node, which originally transmitted the packet over the at least one transmission channel, retransmits the packet using the same transmission resource as the one used by the same node in the preceding transmission of said packet.