A novel Alamouti-coded decode-and-forward protocol for cooperative communications

In this paper, we propose an Alamouti-coded decode-and-forward protocol for two-user cooperative communications. The proposed scheme achieves the maximum diversity gain and lower probability of error in comparison with existing decode and forward (DF) cooperative protocols. The cooperation criterion is based on the confidence of channel links. Moreover, in the performance analysis, a symbol error rate (SER) upper bound are studied and compared with the simulation results. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the existing protocols, and the theoretical SER curve is closed to the simulated SER curve.