A cross-layer design approach in cooperative OFDM systems: Application to mobile cell-border situation

The cooperative communication has recently gained momentum in the research community. This technique utilizes the notion of relay, as an intermediate node between the source and the destination, to enhance the overall system performance. In this paper we explored the benefits of adaptive cooperation, in which the relay adapts its relaying process in response to channel conditions and type of data priorities. In this paper, we propose to use the exponential effective signal to noise (SNR) mapping (EESM) technique to estimate the packet error rate (PER) at the relay node. Once estimated, the PER is then used to adapt the resource allocation process at the medium access control (MAC) layer according to different data priorities required by the destinations. We show that by using a new adaptive resource allocation technique in combination with the cross layer design approach, we can achieve real-time data constraints with no additional overhead. The simulation results given by applying this concept to cell border situation shows the efficiency of the proposed approach.