  An abstraction of the physical layer coding using bit pipes that are coupled
through data-rates is insufficient to capture notions such as node cooperation
in cooperative relay networks. Consequently, network-stability analyses based
on such abstractions are valid for non-cooperative schemes alone and
meaningless for cooperative schemes. Motivated from this, this paper develops a
framework that brings the information-theoretic coding scheme together with
network-stability analysis. This framework does not constrain the system to any
particular achievable scheme, i.e., the relays can use any cooperative coding
strategy of its choice, be it amplify/compress/quantize or any
alter-and-forward scheme. The paper focuses on the scenario when coherence
duration is of the same order of the packet/codeword duration, the channel
distribution is unknown and the fading state is only known causally. The main
contributions of this paper are two-fold: first, it develops a low-complexity
queue-architecture to enable stable operation of cooperative relay networks,
and, second, it establishes the throughput optimality of a simple network
algorithm that utilizes this queue-architecture.
