Distributed scheduling algorithm for cooperative transmission with multiple relays

Cooperative transmission can improve the performance of wireless ad-hoc systems due to its spatial multiplexing gain. Given that multiple cooperative relays which belong to the same source-destination pair can transmit simultaneously in the cooperative transmission, it is different from normal data transmission in which only one source node transmits in a single source-destination pair. Therefore, a new distributed scheduling algorithm for wireless ad-hoc systems should be devised. To this end, we propose a distributed scheduling algorithm for wireless ad-hoc systems with cooperative transmission in which multiple cooperative relays can transmit at the same time by using Amplify-and-Forward or Decode-and-Forward scheme. By using the elastic exclusive distance which is the minimum distance between two active cooperative transmission sets, the outage probability of cooperative transmissions can be greatly reduced compared to that of conventional scheduling scheme. Through performance analysis and simulation results, we show that the proposed scheme can enhance the performance of the system.