Joint Adaptive Modulation Coding and Cooperative ARQ over Relay Channels-Applications to Land Mobile Satellite Communications

In a cooperative relay network, a relay node (R) facilitates data transmission to the destination node (D), when the latter is unable to decode the source node (S) data correctly. This paper considers such a system model and presents a cross-layer approach to jointly design adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical layer and cooperative truncated automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol at the data link layer. We first derive a closed form expression for the spectral efficiency of the joint cooperative ARQ-AMC scheme. Aiming at maximizing this performance measure, we then optimize two AMC schemes for S-D and R-D links, which directly satisfy a prescribed packet loss rate constraint. As an interesting application, we also consider the problem of joint link adaptation and blockage mitigation in land mobile satellite communications (LMSC). We also present a new relay-assisted transmission protocol for LMSC, which delivers the source data to the destination via the relaying link, when the S-D channel is in outage. Numerical results indicate that the proposed schemes noticeably enhances the spectral efficiency compared to a system, which uses a conventional ARQ-AMC scheme at the S-D link, or a system which employs an optimized fixed rate cooperative-ARQ protocol.