  In this paper, we propose a new rateless coded cooperation scheme for a
general multi-user cooperative wireless system. We develop cooperation methods
based on Raptor codes with the assumption that the channels face erasure with
specific erasure probabilities and transmitters have no channel state
information. A fully coded cooperation (FCC) and a partially coded cooperation
(PCC) strategy are developed to maximize the average system throughput. Both
PCC and FCC schemes have been analyzed through AND-OR tree analysis and a
linear programming optimization problem is then formulated to find the optimum
degree distribution for each scheme. Simulation results show that optimized
degree distributions can bring considerable throughput gains compared to
existing degree distributions which are designed for point-to-point binary
erasure channels. It is also shown that the PCC scheme outperforms the FCC
scheme in terms of average system throughput.
