Cooperative Fading Regions for Decode and Forward Relaying

Abstract--Cooperative transmission protocols over fading channels are based on a number of relaying nodes to form virtual multiantenna transmissions. Diversity provided by these techniques has been widely analyzed for the Rayleigh fading case. However, short range or fixed wireless communications often experience propagation environments where the fading envelope distribution is meaningfully different from Rayleigh. The main focus in this paper is to investigate the impact of fading distribution on performances of collaborative communication. Cooperative protocols are compared to co-located multi-antenna systems by introducing the concept of cooperative fading region. This is the collection of fading distributions for which relayed transmission can be regarded as a competitive option (in terms of performances) compared to multi-antenna direct (noncooperative) transmission. The analysis is dealt with by adopting the information theoretic outage probability as the performance metric. Coo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TIT
• Authors: Stefano Savazzi, Umberto Spagnolini
• Keywords: Cooperative, Cooperative Transmission, Cooperative Transmission Protocols, TIT 2008