Decode-and-forward relaying technique in UMTS networks
Mingkwan Somphruek, Rolando Antonio Carrasco, Stéphane O. Le Goff · 2010
As fading due to multipath propagation is an important issue in wireless systems, diversity techniques are employed in order to reduce the multipath fading effect. Cooperative communication represents a new class of diversity schemes in which multiple nodes equipped with a single antenna cooperate to generate a virtual multiple-antenna transmission system and thus offer the benefits of spatial diversity. This paper investigates the performance of the well known decode-and-forward cooperative technique on the flat fading indoor channel and also on the pedestrian and vehicular frequency-selective fading channels with decision feedback equalisation, which model the physical layer of UMTS networks in different environments. The performance is evaluated in terms of bit error rate as a function of signal-to-noise ratio with simulation results showing that decode-and-forward relaying provides a remarkable performance improvement over direct transmission.