Asynchronous cooperative diversity

Cooperative diversity, which employs multiple nodes for the simultaneous relaying of a given packet in wireless ad hoc networks, has been shown to be an effective means of improving diversity, and, hence, mitigating the detrimental effects of multipath fading. However, in previously proposed cooperative diversity schemes, it has been assumed that coordination among the relays allows for accurate symbol-level timing synchronization at the destination and orthogonal channel allocation, which can be quite costly in terms of signaling overhead in mobile ad hoc networks, which are often defined by their lack of a fixed infrastructure and the difficulty of centralized control. In this paper, cooperative diversity schemes are considered that do not require symbol-level timing synchronization or orthogonal channelization between the relays employed. In the process, a novel minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receiver is designed for combining disparate inputs in the multiple-relay channel. Outage probability calculations and simulation results demonstrate the not unexpected significant performance gains of the proposed schemes over single-hop transmission, and, more importantly, demonstrate performance comparable to schemes requiring accurate symbol-level synchronization and orthogonal channelization.