Achieving maximum system throughput with cooperative relaying: A case study of IEEE 802.16j multi-hop relay

Various types of cooperative relaying (CR) schemes exhibit different levels of throughput and outage performance because of their inherent trade-off between diversity gain and opportunity cost; in other words, the overhead that is associated with cooperation. This article attempts to answer whether cooperative communication is beneficial or not from the system-level viewpoint and furthermore, if it is, how its average throughput can be maximized while maintaining the target outage rate. In order to improve throughput at the required outage performance, we propose a unified selection criterion to deal with different levels of combining gain and opportunity cost associated with each scheme, which allows for the employment of different CR schemes for various positions of the mobile station. Our system-level simulation results for an IEEE 802.16j multi-hop relay confirm the varying levels of trade-offs among different CR schemes and furthermore, show that CR will be a useful means of maximizing the average throughput for a multi-hop relay system as long as each type of the cooperating scheme is carefully selected, depending on the position of the mobile stations.