Cooperation in the MAC channel using frequency division multiplexing

This paper considers cooperation in the low power/SNR regime for the multiple access channel. We assume that transmitters have no channel state information, and consider the outage capacity. We further assume that the nodes operate in half duplex. The nodes are multiplexed by assigning to each node a unique frequency band via frequency division multiplexing (FDM). A node transmits only on this band while listening on the others. We perform outage wideband analysis on FDM based cooperation, and show perhaps surprisingly that FDM loses very little in performance compared to the idealized situation where nodes can operate in full duplex. We then develop practical rateless coding methods for FDM using Raptor codes.