Improved layering protocol for wireless cooperative networks

In a radio network consider two layers of relays between a source-destination pair, power loss being same for all the relays in a layer but different from layer to layer. In this scenario, so far systems have considered only the signals reaching from source to first layer, first to second, and so on and not source to second, or first to destination. So, signals from these `weak links', that may be significant are ignored. In this paper, we take into account these signals and use them to advantage. Here we propose a new protocol and show that under reasonable channel strength (variance greater than or equal to 0.2) of the `weak links', it achieves lower BER than a suitably modified existing one, assuming the same total transmit power. Also the proposed protocol uses only half the number of relays and two thirds of the overall time spent by the existing protocol.