Experimental Evaluation of DCOOP Protocol Using USRP-RIO Based Testbed at 5.8GHz

Cooperative communication can attain lower error probability in wireless networks by exploiting the inherent broadcast nature and taking advantage of multi-path propagation. In order to leverage performance gains achieved by virtual multiple- input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, we design a novel cooperative protocol, Decode-to-Cooperate (DCOOP). We evaluate its performance on a testbed implemented on Universal Software Radio Peripheral Reconfigurable Input/Output (USRPRIO) platform. The main challenge during the testbed deployment was to consider transmission under tightly synchronized nodes in a slow fading environment. Extensive experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the testbed and the results show that it can operate at lower transmit power and increase the coverage area for a desired bit error rate (BER).