Multihop cooperative communication for vehicular ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a cooperation-based multihop transmission scheme, path-based cooperative multihop relaying, tailored for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Compared to the two traditional multihop relaying schemes, non-cooperative multihop relaying and hop-based cooperative multihop relaying, the proposed transmission scheme is capable of reorganizing the delivery path if an outage happens in the transmission, thus adapting to the instantaneous channel condition and/or the frequently-changing network topology. The analytical results of end-to-end outage probabilities for the proposed transmission scheme and its two alternatives are derived and compared. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analysis and show the effectiveness of the proposed transmission scheme in terms of reducing the end-to-end outage probability. A significant performance gain (13 dB) is observed in the simulation.