Code Combining in Cooperative Communication

Abstract

It is well known that cooperative transmission among the single antenna wireless nodes and a proper combining at destination can obtain spatial diversity. In this paper, we introduce a new form of combining technique in cooperative communication. For a coded transmission scheme code-combining can obtain a near optimal low rate code by combining repeated codewords. Instead of MRC (maximal ratio combining) based combining of received coded packets from source and relays, we propose a simple code-combining at destination. For same data, rate and power consumption code-combining offers better or similar performance with less complexity than MRC. Moreover using a puncturing technique at the relay we can get a same diversity order as MRC with reduced packet relaying time; equivalently, with higher data rate for over all system. This reduction of transmission time at relay allows us to increase the diversity order by using more than one relay for one source; where each relay forwards a punctured portion of received data. Alternatively, when the relays are not available to improve diversity order, we can use only one relay to cooperate M source nodes where all sources obtain a diversity order of 2 with a higher data rate.