Broadcast Cooperation Strategies for Two Colocated Users

This work considers the problem of communication between a remote single transmitter and a destined user, with helping colocated users, over an independent block Rayleigh-fading channel. The colocation nature of the users allows cooperation, which increases the overall achievable rate, from transmitter to destination. The transmitter is ignorant of the fading coefficients, while receivers have access to perfect channel state information (CSI). We propose, for this setting, a multilayer broadcast transmission approach. The broadcast approach enables enhanced cooperation between the colocated users. That is due to the nature of broadcasting, where the better the channel quality, the more layers that can reliably be decoded. The cooperation between the users is performed over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, with a relaying power constraint, and unlimited bandwidth. Three commonly used cooperation techniques are studied: amplify-and-forward (AF), compress–and-forward (CF), and decode–and-forward (DF). These techniques are extended by using the broadcast approach for the case of relaxed decoding delay constraint. For this case, a separate processing of the layers, which includes multisession cooperation is shown to be beneficial. Further, closed-form expressions for infinitely many AF sessions and recursive expressions for the more complex CF are given. Numerical results for the various cooperation strategies demonstrate how the multisession cooperation outperforms conventional relaying techniques.