Performance analysis of coded cooperation diversity in wireless networks

Diversity is an effective technique in enhancing the link quality and increasing network capacity. When multiple antennas cannot be used in mobile units, user cooperation can be employed to provide transmit diversity. In this paper, we analyze the error performance of coded cooperation diversity with multiple cooperating users. We derive the end-to-end bit error probability of coded cooperation (averaged over all cooperation scenarios). We consider different fading distributions for the interuser channels. Furthermore, we consider the case of two cooperating users with correlated uplink channels. Results show that more cooperating users should be allowed under good interuser channel conditions, while it suffices to have two cooperating users in adverse interuser conditions. Furthermore, under bad interuser conditions, more cooperating users can be accommodated as the fading distribution becomes more random.