Towards reliable cooperative communications in clustered ad hoc networks

Node clustering has been considered as a promising approach in ad hoc networks, where the inter cluster routing is limited to some special nodes called cluster head (CH). In practice, the performance of data transmission often degrades with the increase of distance between neighboring CHs. This paper proposes a new scheme that employs intermediate nodes as relays between neighboring CHs. Particularly, we develop both feedback and non-feedback fountain coded cooperative communications to improve reliability and robustness. It is observed that the number of relays plays a significant role in our scheme. Accordingly, we design a rateless coded relay selection (RCRS) algorithm to guarantee the required data rate with a minimum cost. Simulation results show that feedback based protocol outperforms its non-feedback counterpart in terms of end to end rate and throughput.