Performance Evaluation of Cooperative Relays in Rayleigh Channel over Coded Packet Wireless Networks

Performance of cooperative networks have been evaluated using metrics such as bit error rate (BER) and signal-to-ratio (SNR), which are only suitable for measuring the effectiveness of the relay strategies. In this paper, system model that is based on data envelopment analysis method is designed to evaluate the efficiency of cooperative relays. The performances of amplify-and-forward, decode-and-forward, amplify-and-detect are measured and compared in Rayleigh channel over coded packet wireless networks. Viterbi decoding algorithm is considered for decode-and-forward. Further, the performance trade-off for each relay with overheads are analyzed. Simulation results show the performance of the three cooperative relays in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency.