Cooperative Communication Design with Distributed Code Allocation in a Clustered Network

A major challenge for cooperative communication in distributed networks is to coordinate relay transmissions without introducing too much overhead. Targeting a clustered network, we propose a novel cooperative communication scheme including channel quality based relay selection and distributed space-time code allocation in this paper. Both analysis and simulations are carried out to investigate the performance of the proposed cooperative scheme, in terms of packet delivery rate, throughput and energy efficiency, under different channel conditions and network density.