Opportunistic cooperative communications with reed-solomon convolutional concatenated codes

Cooperative communications delivers spatial diversity for a communication system through the collaborated transmission of network users. Assisted by the intelligent relay selection, opportunistic cooperative communications in which the best relay is always selected for signal re-transmission can deliver a diversity gain on the order of number of relay candidates. It has the advantages of requiring low implementation complexity, alleviating user interference and reducing network power consumption. This paper proposes the coded opportunistic cooperative communication systems in which the widely used Reed-Solomon convolutional concatenated (RSCC) code is applied. Two coded opportunistic cooperative schemes are considered, the coded opportunistic amplify-and-forward (COAF) and the coded opportunistic decode-and-forward (CODF). Information theoretic analyses in term of their diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) are re-investigated. Those analyses are substantiated by the design of a practical RSCC coded system and its frame error rate (FER) performance.