Cooperative multi-hop relaying over fading channels

Cooperative diversity in wireless multi-hop networks is emerging as an attractive new way to increase throughput for certain scenarios, reduce energy requirements and provide resistance to channel fading effects. In this paper the performance of multi-hop networks employing cooperative relaying in a generalized Rician fading channel has been investigated and the optimum number of hops necessary for enhanced performance has been determined. Two new relaying schemes, namely, cooperative amplify-and-forward with combining solely at the destination (Coop_AF_DC) and adaptive decode-and-forward with combining at all intermediate nodes (Coop_AdDF_EC) have been proposed in this paper and performance of these schemes have been compared with that of direct transmission and conventional relaying.