A Decode-and-Forward Scheme for Multihop Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose a Decode-and-Forward (DF) relaying scheme for the multihop transmission in wireless networks, where the information generated by an independent source has to be sent to a far destination based on multiplerelay cooperation. The proposed DF scheme blends together convolutional channel coding with linear combination of blocks of data over a finite field. The performance of the proposed system is compared with reference schemes previously proposed in the literature. We provide simulation results showing that using blocks of K = 13 information bits, our scheme clearly outperforms these reference schemes that use blocks of K = 1500 information bits. Moreover, we show that the proposed DF scheme is suitable for large multi-hop networks with relays that share their resources with other networks since: 1) a negligible performance degradation is obtained for adding more hops; and 2) most of the iterative gain at the decoding is achieved in less than 10 iterations.