Cooperative ARQ in wireless sensor networks: Outage behavior and throughput efficiency

In this paper, we investigate the outage behavior and throughput efficiency of a three-node cooperative ARQ system, which is equipped with a decode-and-forward relay node. We introduce four different cooperative ARQ protocols, followed by the analysis of their outage behavior and throughput efficiency under two different kinds of channel dynamics. We propose a general discrete time Markov chain model to calculate the throughput efficiencies for all the four protocols. Simulation results show the validity of our demonstration. And our analysis gives some guidance for the application of these protocols in wireless sensor networks.