Throughput Gains Using Rate and Power Control in Cooperative Relay Networks

In this letter, we use power and rate adaptation to maximize the throughput in cooperative relay networks when limited feedback links to the transmitter nodes exist. We observe that, for a finite rate of feedback, the throughput maximizing outage probability can be relatively high. This suggests using higher rate codes and allowing some outages in an effort to increase the overall network throughput. Our analysis also reveals that the relaying transmission paradigm offers significant throughput gains over direct transmission for any rate of the feedback link. Our work not only demonstrates the power of cooperative coding, but also suggests the importance of network protocols incorporating feedback to allow for throughput maximization