On the performance of cooperative relaying protocols in wireless networks

Cooperative relaying recently emerged as a viable option for future wireless networks. By simultaneously exploiting path loss savings known from relaying scenarios and the diversity inherent to any scheme involving spatially separated transmitters, this technique is able to leverage gains from both relaying and spatial diversity techniques. In this paper, we study different cooperative relaying protocols and compare their performance with that of direct transmission and conventional relaying. We investigate under which conditions the developed techniques provide gains over other approaches. Our results confirm that cooperative relaying is an effective means of enhancing the performance of wireless systems whenever temporal and frequency diversity is scarce.