Cooperative Transmission in a Wireless Relay Network Based on Flow Management

Cooperative transmission protocols using a flow optimization approach for a general multi-node half-duplex wireless relay network are presented. The proposed design involves solving a convex flow optimization problem on a graph that models the relay network. Two protocols are developed using the techniques of broadcasting (BC), multiple-access (MA), and time sharing (TS), and both are shown to achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT). Simulation results are used to quantify the performances of the proposed protocols in terms of outage probabilities, and to compare them against the max-flow-min-cut bound.