A Novel Destination Cooperation Scheme in Interference Channels

Diversity is a technique used to combat fading in wireless communication channels. One can attain spatial diversity using Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) techniques to achieve high bit rates required for evolving multimedia applications. On the other hand, cooperative communication can be used to achieve the diversity gains typical of MIMO without the necessity for multiple antennas on the wireless units. In this paper, we investigate the use of receiving node (destination) cooperation. We evaluate the performance of a novel destination cooperation scheme in an interference channel (DC-IC). We compare the performance of this scheme with the baseline 2-user orthogonal channel method and with a scheme we proposed earlier. There, we demonstrated that the 2-user DC-IC outperforms the baseline technique by far. This is due to the cooperative communication. In the cooperative scheme, the receiver nodes in the first phase, decode the received information from both sources while in the second phase they cooperate. The novel scheme presented here provides both diversity and about 2dB coding gain. We present several scenarios that illustrate the efficiency of employing such technique with and without channel coding.