Cooperative Concatenated Coding in Multi-Hop Multiple Access Relay Networks

We propose a cooperative concatenated coding scheme in multi-hop multiple access relay networks, where the parity bits generated in the previous hops are concatenated with those in the next hop such that the error recovery capability improves as the information travels through the network. It is based on the idea of cross-hop cooperation where the cooperation occurs across multiple hops, as opposed to the traditional cooperation within a hop. This approach enables the network coding gain to grow with each additional hop, which allows the relay nodes closer to the final destination to reduce their transmit powers. This feature is particularly useful in compensating the increased energy consumption from relaying more data as the data merge to the destination in multiple access relay networks. We derive the average probability of decoding error and throughput, averaged over all possible node locations, as a function of the number of hops taking into account the lossy nature of wireless links. We show how the relays should be traded across hops in order to maximize the end-to-end performance.