Cooperative Binary Relaying and Combining for multi-hop wireless communication

Cooperative communication can achieve diversity gain and increase the channel capacity. This paper proposes a novel cooperative scheme called Cooperative Binary Relaying and Combining (CBRC) for multi-hop wireless networking systems where the nodes cooperatively demodulate high-order modulated signal symbols with low-order robust modulations. Low-order demodulation schemes make partial decision at each relay node and avoid propagating the errors that can result from high-order demodulation schemes in conventional cooperative relaying. Therefore, CBRC supports high bit rate transmission at high-order modulations over low SNR links. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the bit error rate performance of CBRC and conventional cooperative strategies. The results show that CBRC can significantly improve the performance.