Employing cooperative diversity for performance enhancement in UWB communication systems

Due to limitation on transmitted power level, any UWB system faces major design challenges in achieving wide coverage while assuring an adequate system performance. In this paper, an employment of cooperative communications in UWB is proposed to enhance the performance and the coverage of UWB by exploiting the broadcasting nature of wireless channels and the cooperation among UWB devices. Symbol-error-rate (SER) performance analysis and optimum power allocation are provided for cooperative UWB multiband OFDM systems with decode-and-forward cooperative protocol. To capture the multipath-clustering phenomenon of UWB channels, the SER performance is characterized in terms of cluster and ray arrival rates. An optimum power allocation is determined based on two different objectives, namely minimizing the overall transmitted power and maximizing the system coverage. Furthermore, an improved cooperative UWB multiband OFDM scheme is proposed to take advantage of unoccupied subbands. Simulation results are shown to validate the theoretical analysis.