Cooperative Relay Using Erasure Codes for Reliable Data Transport in Wireless Networks

Providing efficient and reliable data transport is a challenging problem for a variety of emerging applications which require reliable data packet delivery in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose to incorporate erasure codes at transport layer in the notion of cooperative relay communications to provide reliability and robustness for data transport in wireless networks. Our basic idea is to exploit the joint merits of erasure codes and cooperative relay communications. We design two cooperative relay strategies with different implementation complexity and analyze their performance based on a general 3-node relay model. Numerical results show that our proposed approach can achieve significant performance improvement in terms of data transport efficiency. In addition, the proposed approach exhibits strong robustness to packet losses on wireless links for data transfer.