A highly efficient protocol for rateless coding aided cooperative cellular networks

Cooperative relaying has been proposed as a promising technology to provide reliable high data rate services for future wireless networks. The work presented here focuses on a novel efficient three time-slot approach using rateless codes, opportunistic fountain (OF), for cellular networks with fixed relays. This scheme enjoys benefits from both relay selection and inter-relay cooperation, offering improved performance. As an extension, the dynamic opportunistic fountain (DOF) scheme is developed, in which the time slots are allowed to last for a duration that depends on the instantaneous channel realization. Solving for the outage-optimal relay selection and time-slot allocation is formulated as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem. In comparison to the conventional counterpart, it is observed that the DOF offers significant performance gains, and the benefits are confirmed by extensive simulations.