Opportunistic user cooperative relaying in TDMA-based wireless networks

This paper proposes a novel protocol based on cooperative relaying between users. The protocol takes advantage of the fact that data traffic is bursty and silent periods exist between data bursts. Rather than wasting these idle time slots, users can take advantage of them to perform cooperative relaying, obviating the need for dedicated system resources for relaying, hence using the spectrum more efficiently. The benefit of this user cooperation for the higher network layers is analyzed. The system was modeled in terms of the maximum stability region and the maximum stable throughput. Our results show that our proposed protocol provides significant performance gains compared to conventional time-division multiple-access (TDMA) systems, as well as cooperative relaying protocols, namely selection relaying and incremental relaying. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.