Comparative study of cooperative transmission techniques in multipath rician fading environments
Eleftherios Koxias, Stylianos Papaharalabos, A. Michalopoulou, F. Lazarakis, Antonis A. Alexandridis, Kostas P. Dangakis, Panayotis G. Cottis · 2015
Several cooperative transmission techniques have been studied in previous research works but very few of them have considered the trade-off between diversity gain and energy efficiency, which is important in cases, such as wireless sensor networks. Two cooperative transmission techniques are examined, namely decode-and-forward (DF) and network coding (NC), both with selection combining (SC) at the receiver, in order to evaluate the performance of the aforementioned techniques with respect to the variation of the k-factor in Rician fading channels. Computer-based simulations show that, in most of the considered scenarios, NC scheme can result in smaller diversity gain compared to DF scheme, however it achieves significantly lower energy consumption at the relay node.