Cooperative Digital Audio Broadcast Networks

Digital audio broadcast (DAB) systems are considered for delivery of audio information to users in heavily attended sporting, cultural, and amusement events [1]. A unique property of such events is the high density of users. A direct result of this property is the high spatial fading correlation. This in fact may be taken into advantage to enhance the reception quality at DAB terminals. In this paper, a cooperative communication scheme is proposed in which DAB terminals are provided with the capability to relay the audio transmission using an Amplify- and-Forward (AF) strategy. The proposed scheme is shown to provide significant performance enhancements. Analysis results provided in this paper also suggest that considerable reductions in power consumption at DAB terminals may be also attained using the proposed scheme.