Segment cooperation communication in multi-hop wireless networks

Cooperative communication could enhance the performance of wireless communications by allowing nodes to cooperate with each other to provide spatial diversity gain. In cooperative communications, rational helper selection is an important issue to obtain good cooperative gain at destinations. There are many works on this topic; however, most of them are based on hop-by-hop model and few works investigate how to select helpers for the nodes in a multi-hop path to optimize the end-to-end performance. The helper selection for one node could affect the helper selection for other nodes on the same route and in turn affect end-to-end performance. In other words, the traditional hop-by-hop helper selection methods could not lead to optimal performance in multi-hop environments. To solve this, this paper firstly defines a novel cooperation mode, named segment cooperation, and deduces the capacity and outage probability of cooperation segment. Then new performance metrics, end-to-end capacity and end-to-end outage probability, are defined to measure the end-to-end performance of multi-hop route. Finally, a segment cooperation method is proposed to maximize these metrics.