Performance Analysis and Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff in Virtual Antenna Array

Cooperative communication has been recently proposed as a way to provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless environments. Most literatures about cooperative communication assume each node is equipped with only one interface or several homogeneous interfaces. To date, mobile terminals with heterogeneous interfaces become more popular, which motivate us to study cooperative communication in cellular networks, where each mobile terminals equipped with heterogeneous interfaces. We demonstrate that the difference between heterogeneous interfaces can bring extra gains. In addition to diversity gain, the extra spatial multiplexing gain can be achieved. Moreover, we characterize the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of two VAA schemes.