Fountain codes based partial cooperation in cooperative communications

Abstract

To improve the throughput performance without feedback channel, a partial cooperation scheme based on fountain codes is proposed in this paper. Compared with the incremental relaying where the signal is retransmitted in fixed or selective relay and fed back to the source from the destination, the proposed scheme only requires the partner to offer partial encoded packets in collaborative phase. Simulation results show that throughput performance of the proposed scheme outperforms that of incremental relaying, which has ever been considered as the optimal scheme in three-terminal cooperative communications system with the partial cooperation parameter around 0.1 in our simulation. In particular, the proposed scheme allows for an easy extension to multiple partners.