An opportunistic cooperation scheme and its BER analysis

The cooperative communication technology proposed in recent years enables network nodes to share their antennas to achieve diversity gain. In this paper, an efficient variation scheme on opportunistic cooperation is proposed by using an outage criterion, in which the cooperation mode will be adopted only when the channel from source to relay does not occur outage event. We derive a closed-form BER (bit error rate) expression for the proposed scheme over Rayleigh fading channels, showing that the full diversity is achieved by the new scheme. Also, the BER performance of the known coded cooperation is presented for the purpose of comparison with our scheme. Numerical results illustrate the superiority of the proposed scheme over the coded cooperation in terms of BER performance. It is pointed out that the corresponding BER advantage of the proposed scheme comes at the expense of increasing system overhead since the new scheme needs some feedback from relay to both source and destination.