In wireless networks relay nodes can be used to assist the users' transmissions to reach their destination. Work on relay cooperation, from a physical layer perspective, has up to now yielded well-known results. This paper takes a different stance focusing on network-level cooperation. Extending previous results for a single relay, we investigate here the benefits from the deployment of a second one. We assume that the two relays do not generate packets of their own and the system employs random access to the medium; we further consider slotted time and that the users have saturated queues. We obtain analytical expressions for the arrival and service rates of the queues of the two relays and the stability conditions. We investigate a model of the system, in which the users are divided into clusters, each being served by one relay, and show its advantages in terms of aggregate and throughput per user. We quantify the above, analytically for the case of the collision channel and through simulations for the case of Multi-Packet Reception (MPR), and we provide insight on when the deployment of a second relay in the system can yield significant advantages.
The notion of cooperative communications was introduced by information theory with the relay channel. The relay channel is the basic building block for the implementation of cooperative communications, which are widely acknowledged to provide higher communication rates and reliability in a wireless network with time varying channels @cite_29 . It was initially proposed by van der Meulen @cite_3 , and its first information-theoretic characterizations were presented in @cite_21 .
@cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_3
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Cooperative diversity has been recently proposed as a way to form virtual antenna arrays that provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless environments. However, most of the proposed solutions require distributed space-time coding algorithms, the careful design of which is left for future investigation if there is more than one cooperative relay. We propose a novel scheme that alleviates these problems and provides diversity gains on the order of the number of relays in the network. Our scheme first selects the best relay from a set of M available relays and then uses this "best" relay for cooperation between the source and the destination. We develop and analyze a distributed method to select the best relay that requires no topology information and is based on local measurements of the instantaneous channel conditions. This method also requires no explicit communication among the relays. The success (or failure) to select the best available path depends on the statistics of the wireless channel, and a methodology to evaluate performance for any kind of wireless channel statistics, is provided. Information theoretic analysis of outage probability shows that our scheme achieves the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex protocols, where coordination and distributed space-time coding for M relay nodes is required, such as those proposed by Laneman and Wornell (2003). The simplicity of the technique allows for immediate implementation in existing radio hardware and its adoption could provide for improved flexibility, reliability, and efficiency in future 4G wireless systems. Relays receive and retransmit signals between one or more sources and one or more destinations. Cooperative relaying is a novel technique for wireless communications that increases throughput and extends the coverage of networks. The task of relay selection serves as a building block to realize cooperative relaying. Recently, relays with buffers have been incorporated into cooperative relaying providing extra degrees of freedom in selection, thus improving various performance metrics, such as outage probability, power reduction, and throughput, at the expense of tolerating an increase in packet delay. In this survey, we review and classify various buffer-aided relay selection policies and discuss their importance through applications. The classification is mainly based on the following aspects: 1) duplexing capabilities, 2) channel state information (CSI), 3) transmission strategies, 4) relay mode, and 5) performance metrics. Relay selection policies for enhanced physical-layer security and cognitive communications with reduced interference are also discussed. Then, a framework for modeling such algorithms is presented based on Markov Chain theory. In addition, performance evaluation is conducted for various buffer-aided relay selection algorithms. To provide a broad perspective on the role of buffer-aided relay selection, various issues relevant to fifth-generation (5G) networks are discussed. Finally, we draw conclusion and discuss current challenges, possible future directions, and emerging technologies. This paper establishes the utility of user cooperation in facilitating secure wireless communications. In particular, the four-terminal relay-eavesdropper channel is introduced and an outer-bound on the optimal rate-equivocation region is derived. Several cooperation strategies are then devised and the corresponding achievable rate-equivocation region are characterized. Of particular interest is the novel noise-forwarding (NF) strategy, where the relay node sends codewords independent of the source message to confuse the eavesdropper. This strategy is used to illustrate the deaf helper phenomenon, where the relay is able to facilitate secure communications while being totally ignorant of the transmitted messages. Furthermore, NF is shown to increase the secrecy capacity in the reversely degraded scenario, where the relay node fails to offer performance gains in the classical setting. The gain offered by the proposed cooperation strategies is then proved theoretically and validated numerically in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Recent studies demonstrated that dynamic spectrum access can improve spectrum utilization significantly by allowing secondary unlicensed users to dynamically share the spectrum that is not used by the primary licensed users. Cognitive radio was proposed to promote the spectrum utilization by opportunistically exploiting the existence of spectrum "holes." Meanwhile, cooperative relay technology is regarded widely as a key technology for increasing transmission diversity gain in various types of wireless networks, including cognitive radio networks. In this article, we first give a brief overview of the envisioned applications of: cooperative relay technology to CRNs, cooperative transmission of primary traffic by secondary users, cooperative transmission between secondary nodes to improve spatial diversity, and cooperative relay between secondary nodes to improve spectrum diversity. As the latter is a new direction, in this article we focus on this scenario and investigate a simple wireless network, where a spectrum-rich node is selected as the relay node to improve the performance between the source and the destination. With the introduction of cooperative relay, many unique problems should be considered, especially the issue for relay selection and spectrum allocation. To demonstrate the feasibility and performance of cooperative relay for cognitive radio, a new MAC protocol was proposed and implemented in a universal software radio peripheral-based testbed. Experimental results show that the throughput of the whole system is greatly increased by exploiting the benefit of cooperative relay.