Novel cooperative communication schemes with interference management for multi-user wireless networks

Cooperative communication is a promising technique for future wireless networks. It can be used in improving communication reliability, and enhancing power and spectrum efficiency. However, its performance gain degrades in the presence of co-channel interference which makes it essential to propose interference mitigation schemes. In this paper, we introduce two efficient cooperative communication schemes with interference management for multi-user cooperative wireless networks that are based on best relay and user selection (BRUS) technique. BRUS maximizes the received signal to noise ratio (SNR) while minimizing the interference by an optimal time slot allocation for the users. The first introduced scheme is using BRUS technique only if the user demands cooperation, and the second scheme is always using BRUS technique to enhance the system performance. We derive exact closed form expressions for the outage probability, ergodic capacity, average consumed power, and average bit error probability for the introduced cooperative schemes. Simulations are used to validate the analytical results and an agreement is observed. The results confirm the advantage of the introduced cooperation schemes in enhancing the system performance and improving the interference management.