Protocol-level cooperation in wireless networks: Stable throughput and delay analysis

We study the impact of user cooperation in wireless networks on improving the stable throughput and delay performance. Specifically, we consider a multiaccess system in which a set of source users generate packets to deliver to a common destination. A cooperation strategy is proposed at the protocol level, where users with a better channel to the destination have the option to relay packets from users that are farther afield. For the case of erasure channels with single-packet reception, we derive the stable throughput regions under different multiple access policies based on such cooperation strategy. Then we prove that the stable throughput region of the cooperative system strictly contains the stable throughput region achieved without cooperation. We also assess the delay performance, and show that cooperation significantly reduces the delay of all users. Finally, we characterize the effect of inter-user channel quality on performance, and show that the gain in performance through cooperation increases as the channel quality improves. Our work offers an innovative perspective by implementing cooperation at the network protocol level, while taking into consideration of fading and attenuation at the physical layer as well as the nature of traffic burstiness in a network.