Analysis of Outage Probability for Cooperative Networks with HARQ

We derive the expressions of the outage probability for a wireless network that integrates hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) and coded cooperation among nodes. The medium access control (MAC) provides a HARQ protocol where the source node, upon a decoding failure at the destination node, transmits additional coded bits for the same data packet. If a neighbor node is able to decode the first transmission, it cooperates with the source by sending additional coded bits. In order to keep nodes simple, we assume half-duplex, single band asynchronous transmissions, and receivers with single user detection techniques. Various configurations of cooperation are considered and the analysis includes key characteristics of wireless communications and interference.