The classical three-terminal relaying scenario can be generalized to an entire cluster of relayers, which in this paper is assumed to be densely deployed. We consider the combination of cluster-based relaying with a packet-combining technique where the user data of a packet is partitioned into contiguous segments that can be individually checked for correctness. In such a setup the question arises how to schedule the transmissions of the relayers to either minimize the average transmission costs until at least one (and then all) relayers have the full set of segments, or to maximize the per-segment diversity, i.e. the number of distinct relayers sending the same segment. We investigate different options for scheduling the relayer cluster and show that under certain assumptions, average-optimal and easily implementable schedules exist. We furthermore provide numerical evidence that the adoption of a segment-based approach gives performance benefits over the "classical" method which only considers correctness of whole packets.
['Andreas Willig', 'Holger Karl', 'Danil Kipnis']
Segment-based packet combining: how to schedule a dense relayer cluster?