High Diversity Scheme for Wireless Networks based on Interference Cancellation

Consider a wireless network with m transmitter-receiver pairs and an additional n relay nodes to assist communication. We are interested in the rate/diversity trade-off of such a system. Since the presence of interference is known to reduce diversity significantly, we propose a transmission scheme based on interference cancellation by the relay nodes. This scheme achieves a diversity linear in the number of relay nodes (over all rates up to the maximum possible). Compared to a protocol where receivers decode all transmitted messages, the new scheme is seen to achieve higher diversity at higher rates.