Cooperative multi-hop relaying over fading channels using cascaded 2-hop technique

Use of cooperative diversity in wireless multi-hop networks has been found to be an attractive new way to increase throughput for certain scenarios, reduce energy requirements and provide resistance to channel fading effects. In this paper, we introduce a cascaded 2-hop technique for multi-hop networks employing cooperative relaying and investigate the performance of this approach in a generalized Rician fading channel. In this context we also propose two new relaying schemes, namely, cooperative cascaded 2-hop with resource reuse (Coop_C2_RRU) and cooperative cascaded 2-hop with no resource reuse (Coop_C2_NRRU). We evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes and compare with those of direct transmission and conventional relaying.