Predictive relay-selection cooperative diversity in land mobile satellite systems

Abstract

Cooperative diversity protocols promise a new dimension of diversity that provides better communication by engaging nearby relays in forming a ‘virtual’ array of antennas for combined signal transmission. The current incremental cooperative diversity algorithms incrementally select best relay(s) to cooperate based on the channel quality reported by the relays. However, the algorithms do not take into consideration the fact that the chosen best relay(s) at estimation may not always be the best at the time of communication. This is due to the time delay between the relay selection and its transmission of signal (problem of outdated channel quality information (CQI)). To solve this problem, the concept of channel prediction is introduced and employed whereby each relay determines a predicted value of its CQI based on its past measurements. The paper therefore develops a novel predictive relay-selection (PRS) cooperative diversity model that seeks to improve land mobile satellite communication through prediction protocols. In the model, the chosen best relay is the one with the best predicted CQI value instead of the traditional outdated one. Performance analysis of outage probability and average bit error probability for the newly developed PRS cooperation shows that the PRS cooperation is better than direct and outdated CQI relay communication. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.