Minimum delay packet-sizing for linear multi-hop networks with cooperative transmissions

We consider optimizing packet sizes and the reuse factor to minimize the delay required to send a message between two nodes in a linear multi-hop wireless networks subject to a reliability constraint. In earlier work, this problem was considered for a network in which each node only decoded the transmission of the previous node, treating the transmissions of all other nodes as noise. Here, we consider a cooperative transmission scheme in which a node uses the transmissions of all previous nodes to decode a given message. We analyze the growth of the delay as well as the optimized system parameters as a function of the message size.