This paper analyzes the efficiency of a joint-design of an adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical (PHY) layer with an adaptive R max -truncated selective-repeat automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol at the medium access control (MAC) layer to maximize the throughput of cooperative nonregenerative relay networks under prescribed delay and/or error performance constraints. Particularly, we generalize the existing design model/results for cross-layer combining of AMC along with

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... cated ARQ in non-cooperative diversity networks in three-folds: (i) extension of the cross-layer PHY/MAC design or optimization to cooperative diversity systems; (ii) generalization/unification of analytical expressions for various network performance metrics to generalized block fading channels with independent but nonidentically distributed (i.n.d) fading statistics among the spatially distributed nodes; (iii) analysis of the effectiveness of joint-adaptation of the maximum retransmission limit R max of ARQ protocol and cooperative diversity order N for delay-insensitive applications. Our insightful numerical results reveal that the average throughput can be increased significantly by judiciously combining two additional degrees of freedom (N and R max ) that are available in cooperative amplify-and-forward (CAF) relay networks besides employing AMC at the PHY layer, especially in the most challenging low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime.