Uncoordinated Cooperative Communications with Spatially Random Relays

In traditional cooperative communications, coordination is required among relay nodes to help data transmission through distributed signal transmission or coding techniques. For large cooperative networks, the overhead for coordination is huge and the synchronization among relays is very difficult. In this paper, we propose uncoordinated cooperative communication schemes in a large wireless network that do not need the coordination among relays while realizing cooperative diversity for the source-destination link. Without a central controller, all relays that are spatially randomly placed contend for the channel to relay the packet from the source to the destination in a distributed fashion. The competition for the channel access is governed by the retransmission probability that is independently calculated by the relays according to the location or channel quality information. Three schemes of uncoordinated cooperative communications are proposed to determine the retransmission probabilities of the potential relays based on the local distance, direction, and channel quality, referred to as distance based, sectorized, and local SNR based schemes, respectively. Success probabilities for the proposed uncoordinated schemes are analyzed. Numerical and simulation results show that the local SNR based scheme has the best performance and the distance based scheme outperforms the sectorized scheme.