Performance Enhancement for Multi-hop Short Packet Communication Networks with Amplify-and-Forward Based Hop-by-Hop Cooperative Transmission

In this paper, amplify-and-forward (AF) based hop-by-hop (HBH) cooperative transmission (CooT) scheme is proposed to enhance performance for multi-hop short packet communication (SPC) networks. In particular, a source transmits its data to a destination via a pre-established route. The intermediate nodes on the route employing decode-and-forward relaying (DFR) technique to relay the source data. Additionally, at each hop, an AF node (an outer node) is utilized to assist the data transmission. If there is no available node, the direct transmission is used, instead of the cooperative transmission. We derive expressions of end-to-end block error rate (BLER-e2e) of the proposed scheme over Rayleigh fading channel. We also conduct simulations to validate the correctness of the derived BLER-e2e expression.