Cooperative diversity with incremental redundancy turbo coding for quasi-static wireless networks

We propose an incremental redundancy (IR) cooperative coding scheme employing punctured turbo codes for quasi-static wireless networks. Our scheme enhances the network performance by embedding IR cooperative coding into an existing noncooperative route. More precisely, for each of the noncooperative hops, we consider the following cooperation strategy: we form collaborating cluster of M nodes consisting cf the (hop) sender and its M-1 neighbors. A decode-and-forward algorithm within the cluster enables the IR turbo coding scheme. The approach improves the reliability of multihop routing by employing a powerful coding scheme to enable cooperative diversity. We study its frame-error rate (FER) performance for quasi-static Rayleigh-fading channels based on the threshold behavior of turbo codes. A FER upper bound on the maximum-likelihood decoding and its asymptotic version are derived as a function of channel SNRs and the mother code noise threshold. Simulation results show that our bounds are very good predictors of the proposed scheme performance.