Performance Analysis of Cooperative Wireless Networks With Unreliable Backhaul Links

A cooperative wireless network, where a cluster of K single-antenna transmitters jointly serve a single-antenna receiver, is considered. Each transmitter is connected to the control unit (CU) via independent but unreliable backhaul links. The CU sends a common message to each transmitter over backhaul links, which upon successful reception, jointly transmit this message to the intended receiver. To facilitate analysis, a general expression is derived for the complementary cumulative distribution function of a sum of K independent random variables, where each random variable is a product of an exponential and a Bernoulli random variable. This result is applied to find a simple closed-form expression that characterizes the system outage performance as a function of network parameters and node geometry. The analytical model is validated using numerical simulations. As an application, the derived expression is also used for investigating the impact of backhaul assignment on the system performance.