Joint cooperative diversity and scheduling in low mobility wireless networks

We consider a wireless network, which consists of several active source/destination pairs and a number of idle nodes. Multiple idle nodes volunteer as relays to facilitate the communication. All nodes have low mobility and the fading channel is essentially constant over the latency time scale of interest (block fading). Conventional adaptive scheduling techniques are either unfair or inefficient in this context. We introduce a new approach to jointly utilize adaptive scheduling and cooperative diversity in the low mobility regime. In contrast to known approaches the new scheme does not compromise the quality of service of individual source/destination links (fairness) if the number of relay nodes is sufficiently high. In a typical setup the 1%-outage aggregate throughput is improved by a factor of nine, if six source/destination pairs are considered jointly. We conclude that the joint cooperative diversity and scheduling scheme extends the benefits of adaptive scheduling to the low mobility regime.