NI-USRP based experimental evaluation of cooperative communication over direct communication in lab environment

The development of wireless communication systems (WCS) is the key to develop a much smarter and connected future world encouraging Internet of Everything (IoE), Internet of Things (IoT), Audio-video and Industry 4.0 applications. These attractive services for human society require higher channel capacity and reliability of the system. Cooperative communication (CC) is one of the promising technique to acquire higher channel capacity by overcoming multipath fading and assure the reliability of the system. Most of existing works examine CC through theory or simulation which fails to incorporate real environment problems. The proposed research work analyzes experimental performance of cooperative Communication (CC) in comparison with direct communication (DC) in lab environment. The setup was created in a lab that encompasses several Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and LabVIEW for experimental analysis. Q-PSK modulation scheme have been used to transmit the text message using amplify and forward (AF) relaying mode. The maximum ratio combining (MRC) method is employed to combine SNR received from multiple paths at the receiver end. Comparison was made among DC, single-relay CC, and multi-relay CC to examine its effect on channel capacity. Besides, this work aims to seek the optimal position of the relays by changing the position of the relay to overlook considerable effects on the receiver end. Several experiments have been made to assess the performance of the overall system in a lab environment. The results clearly reveals that multi relay CC offers increased channel capacity and reliability of the system as compared to single-relay CC and DC.