Abstract-Using relays in wireless networks can potentially lead to significant capacity increases. However, within an asynchronous multi-user communication setting, relaying might cause more interference in the network, and significant sum-rate deterioration may be observed. In this work the effect of cooperation in an interference limited, narrow-band wireless network is investigated. It is crucial to determine the optimal trade-off between the amount of throughput gain obtained via cooperation and the amount of interference introduced to the network. We quantify the amount of cooperation using the notion of a cooperative region for each active node. The nodes which lie in such a region are allowed to cooperate with the source. We adopt the decode-andforward scheme at the relays and use the physical interference model to determine the probability that a relay node correctly decodes its corresponding source. Through numerical analysis and simulation, we study the optimal cooperative region size to maximize the network sum-rate and energy efficiency, based on network size, relay availability, node decoding threshold, and destination reception capability. It is shown that optimized system performance in terms of the network sum-rate and the power efficiency is significantly improved compared with cases where relay nodes are not exploited or where the cooperative region size is suboptimal.
The tradeoff between the benefit of adopting cooperative relaying and the interference generated by relays is highlighted in REF in terms of the sum-rate and energy efficiency of a cooperative asynchronous multi-user scenario.
Cooperative Diversity in Interference Limited Wireless Networks
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Mathematics Computer Science