The Performance of Multistage Cooperation in Relay Networks

We analyze the performance of multistage cooperation in decode-and-forward relay networks where the transmission between source and destination takes place in T >= 2 equal duration and orthogonal time phases with the help of relays. The source transmits only in the first time phase. All relays that can decode the source's transmission forward the source's message to the destination in the second time phase, using a space-time code. During subsequent time phases, the relays that have successfully decoded the source message using information from all previous transmitting relays, transmit the space-time coded symbols for the source's message. The non-decoding relays keep accumulating information and transmit in the later stages when they are able to decode. This process continues for T cooperation phases. We develop and analyze the outage probability of multistage cooperation protocol under orthogonal relaying. Through analytical results, we obtain the near-optimal placement strategy for relays that gives the best performance when compared with most other candidate relay location strategies of interest. For different relay network topologies, we also investigate an interesting tradeoff between an increased SNR and decreased spectral efficiency as the number of cooperation stages is increased. It is also shown that the largest multistage cooperation gain is obtained in the low and moderate SNR regime.