Comparative investigation of coded cooperative communication systems

Cooperative communication uses multipath transmission to combat the effect of individual severe fading and path loss. So far, there are mainly three types of cooperative schemes: Amplify-and-Forward, Decode-and-Forward, and Coded Cooperation. This paper presents a convolutional coded system model and performance comparison between these three schemes. Also, this paper reveals two important parameters that determine the performance of different levels of Coded Cooperation schemes: percentage of cooperation and distributed effect for the transmitted symbols. They will be analysed and some contributing conclusions of our work will be drawn.