Cooperative spatial multiplexing for high-rate wireless communications

We propose a new cooperative communication approach that simplifies the transmit and receive processing requirement on the relay node while providing significant savings in the transmission energy over the cooperative diversity technique, particularly in high spectral efficiency regime. The proposed approach is to make each relay node to detect only a fraction (sub-stream) of the source data stream and forward all sub-streams simultaneously over the same physical channel. Then, multiple receive antennas at the destination allow the sub-streams to be detected separately based on their spatial characteristics. The distinctive benefit of this approach is the reduction of transmit and receive processing requirements on each relay node. Therefore, the proposed approach is particularly attractive in sending high-rate data where each relay node can handle only low-rates due to limited resources in terms of energy, computation power, hardware, and space (size).