Cooperative retransmission for wireless regenerative multirelay networks

This paper investigates retransmission (RT) mechanisms in wireless regenerative multirelay networks. Conventionally, the RT can be realized in a cooperative manner with the assistance of all available relays. However, this may result in high overall power consumption due to the RT of the same packets across the nodes, particularly when the number of relays is large. We propose a cooperative RT (CR) scheme based on relay cooperation (RC) and binary xor operations to significantly reduce the number of packets retransmitted to produce a more power-efficient system with nonoverlapped RTs. Significantly, we also derive the error probability of RT decisions at the source and relays and show that the proposed CR scheme improves the reliability of the RTs. Furthermore, by deriving the average number of packets to be retransmitted at the source and relays, we not only show that the proposed CR scheme reduces the number of RTs and removes overlapped retransmitted packets but determine the optimized number of relays used for the RT phase as well. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the validity of the analytical expressions.