A Markovian Analysis of Cooperative ARQ with Random Access

Cooperative ARQ networks enhance network throughput utilizing cooperative diversity at the data link layer where relays help communicating nodes during ARQ retransmissions. When network operates in ad hoc sense, the channel accesses are not coordinated and retransmissions occur randomly. In this case, cooperation of the relays may cause collisions at the retransmission phase and network throughput may be degraded. From this point of view, a cooperative diversity-multiple access trade-off problem rises. In this paper, an analytical framework is proposed for the solution to this problem, and the performance of cooperative ARQ is compared with traditional ARQ with no cooperation in terms of network performance parameters such as average throughput, average delay and packet loss under realistic channel settings.