Cooperative strategies for interference-limited wireless networks

Consider the communication of a single user aided by a nearby relay involved in a large and dense wireless network where the nodes form an homogeneous Poisson point process. We assume that the network is working in the interference-limited regime. In this case the asymptotic error probability is bounded from above by the outage probability experienced by the user. We investigate the outage behavior for the well-known cooperative schemes, namely, decode-and-forward (DF) and compress-and-forward (CF). In this setting, the outage events are induced by both fading and the spatial proximity of neighbor nodes who generate the strongest interference and hence the worst communication case. Upper and lower bounds on the asymptotic error probability which are tight in some cases are derived. It is shown that there exists a clear trade-off between the network density and the benefits of user cooperation. These results are useful to evaluate performance and to optimize relaying schemes in the context of large wireless networks.