Outage probability of random relying of MDS codeword blocks in cooperative multi-hop networks

We propose the use of MDS codes in cooperative multi-hop networks and evaluate its outage probability by means of a non-homogeneous absorbing Markov chain. The proposed scheme can apply to cooperative multi-hop networks with the arbitrary number of relay nodes and require no feedback channels between nodes. In the proposed scheme, a message block is encoded by a MDS code. A relay node partitions a codeword of the MDS code into some blocks and transmits one randomly selected codeword block. When each relay node receives two or more codeword blocks of the MDS code, it aggregates the blocks, corrects channel errors with the aid of the MDS code. Numerical results indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by incorporating an MDS code.