Design, Implementation and Characterization of a Cooperative Communications System

Cooperative communications is a class of techniques which seek to improve reliability and throughput in wireless systems by pooling the resources of distributed nodes. While cooperation can occur at different network layers and time scales, physical layer cooperation at symbol time scales offers the largest benefit in combating losses due to fading. However, symbol level cooperation poses significant implementation challenges, especially in synchronizing the behaviors and carrier frequencies of distributed nodes. We present the implementation and characterization of a complete, real-time cooperative physical layer transceiver built on the Rice Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP). In our implementation autonomous nodes employ physical layer cooperation without a central synchronization source, and are capable of selecting between non-cooperative and cooperative communication per packet. Cooperative transmissions use a distributed Alamouti space-time block code and employ ei...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Patrick Murphy, Ashutosh Sabharwal
• Keywords: Cooperative Communication, CORR 2011, Education, Physical Layer Cooperation, Physical Layer Transceiver