Outage Analysis of Myopic Multi-hop Relaying: A Markov Chain Approach

In this paper, a cooperative protocol is investigated for a multi-hop network with buffers of finite size at the relay nodes. The protocol is based on the myopic decode-and-forward coding strategy, where each node of the network cooperates with a limited number of neighboring nodes for the transmission of the signals. Each relay stores in its buffer the messages that were successfully decoded, in order to forward them through the appropriate channel links. A complete theoretical framework is investigated that models the evolution of the buffers as a state Markov chain (MC). We analyze the performance of the proposed protocol in terms of outage probability and diversity gain by using the state transition matrix and the related steady state of the MC. Our results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional multi-hop relaying scheme and the system's outage probability as well as the achieved diversity order depend on the degree of cooperation among neighboring nodes.