Optimal routing for decode-and-forward based cooperation in wireless networks

We investigate cooperative wireless relay networks in which the nodes can help each other in data transmission. We study different coding strategies in the single-source single-destination network with many relay nodes. Given the myriad of ways in which nodes can cooperate, there is a natural routing problem, i.e., determining an ordered set of nodes to relay the data from the source to the destination. We find that for a given route, the decode- and-forward strategy, which is an information theoretic cooperative coding strategy, achieves rates significantly higher than that achievable by the usual multi-hop coding strategy, which is a point-to-point non-cooperative coding strategy. We construct an algorithm to find an optimal route (in terms of rate maximizing) for the decode-and- forward strategy. Since the algorithm runs in factorial time in the worst case, we propose a heuristic algorithm that runs in polynomial time. The heuristic algorithm outputs an optimal route when the nodes transmit independent codewords. We implement these coding strategies using practical low density parity check codes to compare the performance of the strategies on different routes.