Rateless Coded Cooperation for Multiple-Access Channels in the Low Power Regime

Current research on cooperation in wireless communications has mainly focused on ergodic capacity in high SNR (or at least finite SNR) case. We show that cooperation is more efficient in the low power regime when considering outage capacity. We develop cooperation methods that are particularly efficient in the low power regime. They can be easily scaled to large networks when combined with rateless codes. The results show that there is a large gain in E
_b
/N
₀
|
_min
from cooperation when considering outage capacity in the low power regime. This is in contrast to the fact that in a Gaussian channel, we can at most change the slope of E
_b
/N
₀