This paper investigates the benefits of cooperation and proposes a relay
activation strategy for a large wireless network with multiple transmitters. In
this framework, some nodes cooperate with a nearby node that acts as a relay,
using the decode-and-forward protocol, and others use direct transmission. The
network is modeled as an independently marked Poisson point process and the
source nodes may choose their relays from the set of inactive nodes. Although
cooperation can potentially lead to significant improvements in the performance
of a communication pair, relaying causes additional interference in the
network, increasing the average noise that other nodes see. We investigate how
source nodes should balance cooperation vs. interference to obtain reliable
transmissions, and for this purpose we study and optimize a relay activation
strategy with respect to the outage probability. Surprisingly, in the high
reliability regime, the optimized strategy consists on the activation of all
the relays or none at all, depending on network parameters. We provide a simple
closed-form expression that indicates when the relays should be active, and we
introduce closed form expressions that quantify the performance gains of this
scheme with respect to a network that only uses direct transmission.Comment: Updated version. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Networkin
