This presentation considers reliable transmission of data from a source to a destination, aided cooperatively by wireless relays selected opportunistically and utilizing hybrid forward error correction/detection, and automatic repeat request (Hybrid ARQ, or HARQ). Specifically, we present a performance analysis of the cooperative HARQ protocol in a wireless adhoc multihop network employing spatial ALOHA. We model the nodes in such a network by a homogeneous 2-D Poisson point process. We study the tradeoff between the per-hop rate, spatial density and range of transmissions inherent in the network by optimizing the transport capacity with respect to the network design parameters, HARQ coding rate and medium access probability. We obtain an approximate analytic expression for the expected progress of opportunistic routing and optimize the capacity approximation by convex optimization. By way of numerical results, we show that the network design parameters obtained by optimizing the analytic approximation of transport capacity closely follows that of Monte Carlo based exact transport capacity optimization. As a result of the analysis, we argue that the optimal HARQ coding rate and medium access probability are independent of the node density in the network.
