User Cooperation in the Absence of Phase Information at the Transmitters

In this paper, a multiuser communication system in which wireless users cooperate to transmit information to a base station is considered. The proposed scheme can significantly enlarge the achievable rate region, provided that the wireless connections between pairs of cooperating users are stronger than the connection from every user to the base station. The gains in transmission rate remain substantial even when the channel phase information is only available at the receivers, not at the transmitters. In the proposed scheme, a transmission period is divided into two time intervals. During the first time interval, wireless users send data to the base station and to the neighboring users simultaneously using a broadcast channel paradigm. During the second time interval, the users cooperate to transmit information to the base station. The achievable rate region corresponding to this paradigm is characterized under a random phase channel model for a two-user system. Results are then generalized to a multiple-user scenario. For fixed system parameters, the achievable rate region is strictly larger than that of the traditional multiple-access channel, thereby allowing a fair distribution of the wireless resources among users. Numerical analysis suggests that cooperating with a single partner is enough to achieve most of the benefits associated with cooperation.