On RANC ARQ for Wireless Relay Networks: From the Transmission Perspective

The relay-assisted, network-coding (RANC) automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocols are ARQ protocols that leverage both opportunistic retransmission and network coding for wireless relay networks. This paper proposes two single-relay RANC ARQ protocols, the listen-and-supersede (LS) protocol and the hold-and-proceed (HP) protocol. LS offers a fundamental limit to any single-relay RANC ARQ protocol. HP is a simple yet efficient RANC ARQ protocol with near-zero overhead. Moreover, we analyze saturation throughput and segment delay for both LS and HP. Their performances are compared with a representative cooperative ARQ protocol, the opportunistically forwarding (OF) protocol. Through extensive analysis and simulation results, we show that HP has a performance close to LS and outperforms OF significantly.