Implicit feedback assisted outage minimization for cooperative relay networks

Cooperation among nodes in a network provides spatial diversity as well as it enhances the system´s overall capacity and coverage. However the benefits provided by such systems depends on the level of cooperation (based on the relay information quality) and on the coordination among nodes. One way of achieving proper coordination is through the use of feedback channels. An implicit feedback channel available during relaying has been determined to minimize the feedback among cooperating nodes. In addition, it improves the reliability of information decoding at the destination by mitigating erroneous relay transmissions. The present paper studies the outage analysis of a cooperative transmission scheme assisted by the implicit feedback channel. The analysis is performed in a delay constrained network employing rateless codes. Further, a performance improvement of the order of 2.5 dB is observed for such networks.