Cooperative communication strategies for cascaded sources/relays in wireless networks

Wireless networks with linear topology have attracted increasing attention, as they well represent sensor networks monitoring paths or roads, as well as source-destination routes in large multihop networks. We assume that nodes operate in half-duplex mode, generate their own traffic and relay other nodes´ data to be delivered to a common destination. Unlike previous work, we analyze the above network scenario considering that the nodes can relay traffic over up to two hops, and we devise suitable communication strategies. We show that the proposed schemes exhibit good performance in terms of average achievable rate, when compared to non-cooperative techniques as well as to the cut-set upper bound.