Cooperative Communication for Spatial Frequency Reuse Multihop Wireless Networks under Slow Rayleigh Fading

Cooperative communication has been proposed as a means to increase the capacity of a wireless link by mitigating the path-loss, fading and shadowing effects of radio propagation. In this paper, we evaluate the efficiency of cooperative communication in large scale wireless networks under interference from simultaneous transmissions. Specifically, we consider tunable spatial reuse time division multiplexing and half-duplex decode-and-forward cooperative relaying on a hop-by-hop basis. We show that hop-by-hop cooperation improves the reliability of the transmissions particularly in the low-SINR or in the low-coding rate regimes. Moreover, hop-by-hop cooperative relaying gains 15 - 20% more throughput compared to simple multihopping in the interference-limited regime, if the relay location and the reuse distance are jointly optimized.