The effects of channel characteristics on relay behavior and position in cooperative communication

Abstract

Wireless communication is a communication with a lot of challenges like shadowing, multipath fading, noise and cell coverage that make the communication between transmitter and receiver to be unreliable. Recently, a new concept of Cooperative Communication (CC) was suggested in order to help the communication in wireless network. The main idea that comes with the CC was to helps all the mobiles users and nodes in a network to help each other to send the signal between then until it is transmitted to destination in a cooperative way. In this way the information is not send to the destination by only one user itself but also it passes through others users to help the information to reach the destination. In CC the receiver will not receive the information data from only one user but from different users which makes the receiver to choose the coming information data with good conditions because it is very rare in a network to have all the all users with down links to destination. This project is based on CC in wireless networks. We showed the interest of CC on Bit Error Rate (BER) performance analysis with either an Amplify-and-Forward (AAF) or Decode-and-Forward (DAF) cooperation protocol using Matlab simulation. Through simulation results, it is shown that the best position of a relay node depends on the fading characteristics but also on the distance between the source and the destination.