Outage probability of wireless ad hoc networks with cooperative relaying

In this paper, we analyze the performance of cooperative transmissions in wireless ad hoc networks with random node locations. According to a contention probability for message transmission, each source node can either transmits its own message signal or acts as a potential relay for others. Hence, each destination node can potentially receive two copies of the message signal, one from the direct link and the other from the relay link. Taking the random node locations and interference into account, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability with different combining schemes at the destination nodes. In particular, the outage performance of optimal combining, maximum ratio combining, and selection combining strategies are studied and quantified.