Outage probability of cooperative multi-hop relay networks with MDS codes at link-level

We propose the use of an MDS (Maximum Distance Separable) code at the link-level of cooperative multi-hop relay networks and evaluate the outage probability. A codeword of the MDS code is partitioned into several blocks. Upon receiving one or more codeword blocks of the MDS code, each relay node aggregates the blocks, corrects channel errors with the punctured MDS code, encodes the message by the MDS code, and relays one randomly selected codeword block. Assuming a simple topology, we analyze the performance using an absorbing Markov chain. Numerical results indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by incorporating an MDS code.