Experimental range extension of concurrent cooperative transmission in indoor environments at 2.4GHz

Concurrent cooperative transmission (CCT) is a cooperative transmission (CT) technique where multiple radios transmit diversity versions of the same message at the same time. Through array gain and diversity gain, CCT achieves a signal-to-noise (SNR) advantage, which can be used for better link reliability and transmission range extension. CCT range extension can enable broadcasting with fewer hops, balance energy in wireless sensor networks, and overcome network partitions. However, there are few experimental studies of CT range extension in the literature. In this paper, we consider two-hop directional range extension and two-hop coverage area extension as function of relay cluster topology. In particular, we measure average packet error rate (APER), which is averaged over multipath fading. We estimate path loss and shadowing parameters from the APER, and compare outage rate contours based on the log-distance path loss model to the measured APERs.