Demonstration and implementation of energy efficiency in cooperative networks

This paper presents a comparison between cooperative networks with full relay participation and limited participation (LP), in terms of the energy used by the entire network and the bit error rate (BER) of the received signal. The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) platform was used to perform the transmissions while signal processing, combination and time synchronization was performed on the GNU Radio Companion (GRC). The experiments were performed in an indoor office environment with cooperative transmission (CT) taking place over a single hop network, using binary phase shift keying (BPSK) as the modulation scheme. It has been demonstrated that relay selection provides better energy efficiency for a required quality of service (QoS).