Coded Cooperation for Improved Distance Spectrum and Diversity in Wireless Systems

Cooperative transmission has been gaining enormous attention where users share their resources for an overall improved performance. In this work, coded cooperation is of interest where a novel strategy is proposed with remarkable performance under various scenarios. In contrast to conventional works that focus on cooperative diversity, the proposed scheme successfully explores further coding benefits even when cooperative diversity is physically unavailable. Signal space diversity is also exploited for better cooperative diversity achievement. Imperfect inter-user channels are considered as well where the detrimental error propagation issue due to cooperative coding on erroneously detected messages is solved. Impressive mutual benefit is achieved for users with or without detection problems on their partners' messages.