Abstract—The use of fountain codes in wireless cooperative relay networks can improve the system performance in aspects such as transmission time, energy consumption, transmission efficiency and outage probability etc. This has been proved when the number of the relay nodes and their relaying capabilities are stationary. But in practical networks the relay nodes are variable and dynamic. This paper proposes a simple relay scheme adopting fountain codes, and its performance in the case when the number of the relay nodes and their capabilities to relay data are randomly changing is analyzed. The performance of a normal relay scheme in the same network condition is also analyzed for comparison. The average number of transmitted data packets and transmission time required to transfer a certain number of original data packets from the source node to the destination node are derived. We carry out numerical calculation and simulation for the two schemes. The numerical results and simulation results match very well, and they show it clearly that the fountain transmission scheme can cut down the transmission time greatly.

Index Terms—cooperative relay, wireless dynamic relay networks, fountain codes, transmission time

Cite: Weijia Lei  , Xianzhong Xie,  and Guangjun Li, "Performance Analysis of Wireless Dynamic Cooperative Relay Networks Using Fountain Codes," Journal of Communications, vol. 5, no. 4, pp.307-316 , 2010. Doi: 10.4304/jcm.5.4.307-316