Performance of cooperative multi-hop networks with randomly relayed MDS codeword blocks

We evaluate the outage probability and the spectral efficiency of cooperative multi-hop networks, where L relay nodes are placed at each hop and an MDS (Maximum Distance Separable) code of coding rate 1/L is employed at the link-layer. A codeword of the MDS code is partitioned into L blocks. When each relay node receives two or more codeword blocks of the MDS code, it aggregates the blocks, corrects channel errors with the punctured MDS code, encodes the message by the MDS code, and relays one randomly selected codeword block. We analyze the performance using an absorbing Markov chain. Numerical results indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by incorporating an MDS code for L ≥ 3.