Cooperative diversity with opportunistic beamforming in MIMO systems

The performance of cooperative diversity with opportunistic beamforming is analyzed in Rayleigh fading channels. Cooperative communication is viewed as a method for increasing diversity gain and reducing end to end path loss. The use of relays can create a virtual antenna array so that it allows users to exploit the advantages of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) techniques. In this paper we show that opportunistic beamforming is beneficial for cooperation transmission where the main goal is a very low bit error rate (BER)of the system. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of opportunistic beamforming with cooperative diversity techniques.