This work analyzes the gains of cooperative relaying in interference-limited networks, in which outages can be due to interference and fading. A stochastic model based on point process theory is used to capture the spatial randomness present in contemporary wireless networks. Using a modification of the diversity order metric, the reliability gain of selection decode-and-forward is studied for several cases. The main results are as follows: the achievable \emph{spatial-contention} diversity order (SC-DO) is equal to one irrespective of the type of channel which is due to the ineffectiveness of the relay in the MAC-phase (transmit diversity). In the BC-phase (receive diversity), the SC-DO depends on the amount of fading and spatial interference correlation. In the absence of fading, there is a hard transition between SC-DO of either one or two, depending on the system parameters.
@article{arxiv.1305.3537,
title = {Cooperative Relaying in a Poisson Field of Interferers: A Diversity Order Analysis},
author = {Ralph Tanbourgi and Holger Jäkel and Friedrich K. Jondral},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.3537},
year = {2016}
}