Performance evaluation of cooperative communication for OFDMA based wireless communication system

Recently, the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) based wireless communication system is usually used in interactive digital video broadcasting environments or the wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN). Therefore, the relative condition of the inter-user channel can be easily deteriorated. This paper proposes and evaluates the mutual amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication between two users using modified space time block code (STBC) to provide the reliability for an OFDMA system with a single antenna in an inferior inter-user channel environment. As the results, an OFDMA system adopting the proposed cooperative communication is more robust to the inferior inter-user channel than the previous decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative communication.