  In this paper we present a multi-user cooperative protocol for wireless
networks. Two sources transmit simultaneously their information blocks and
relays employ opportunistically successive interference cancellation (SIC) in
an effort to decode them. An adaptive decode/amplify-and-forward scheme is
applied at the relays to the decoded blocks or their sufficient statistic if
decoding fails. The main feature of the protocol is that SIC is exploited in a
network since more opportunities arise for each block to be decoded as the
number of used relays NRU is increased. This feature leads to benefits in terms
of diversity and multiplexing gains that are proven with the help of an
analytical outage model and a diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) analysis.
The performance improvements are achieved without any network synchronization
and coordination. In the final part of this work the closed-form outage
probability model is used by a novel approach for offline pre-selection of the
NRU relays, that have the best SIC performance, from a larger number of NR
nodes. The analytical results are corroborated with extensive simulations,
while the protocol is compared with orthogonal and multi-user protocols
reported in the literature.
