Improved coded cooperation schemes for wireless communications

Cooperative communications can exploit distributed spatial diversity gain to improve link performance. When the message is coded at a low rate, source and relay can send different parts of a codeword to destination. This is referred to as the coded cooperation. In this paper, we propose two novel coded cooperation schemes for three-node relay networks, i.e., adaptive coded cooperation and ARQ-based coded cooperation. The former one needs the channel quality information available at source. The codeword splits adaptively to minimize the overall BER. The latter one is devised for relay network with erasure. In the first time slot, source sends a high-rate sub-codeword. Once destination reports the decoding errors, either source or relay can send one or two new bits selected from the mother codeword. Unlike random rateless erasure codes, such as Fountain code, the proposed scheme is based on the deterministic code generator and puncture pattern. It is experimentally shown that the proposed scheme can offer improved throughput in comparison with the conventional approach.