Novel protocols for cooperative wireless networks with common destination

In this paper, relay networks specialized for two end users with common destination are studied. Both users transmit their signals directly and via relay to destination in Rayleigh fading channels. In this regard, three novel protocols applying automatic repeat request (ARQ) mechanism at relay and/or destination to guarantee successful packet delivery, are proposed for decode-and-forward (DF) strategy at relay. The new protocols designed to achieve high rate, reliability and energy efficiency, are described based on their Markov chain models. Numerical results involving Shannon's outage probability for each channel both in single and multiple access scenarios, are presented to compare these protocols in terms of goodput, reliability, normalized goodput and energy efficiency.