Bandwidth-efficient OFDM cooperative protocol with applications to UWB communications

In this paper, we propose an OFDM cooperative protocol that not only achieves full diversity but also efficiently utilizes available bandwidth. The proposed protocol exploits limited feedback from the destination terminal (central node) such that each relay is able to help forward information of multiple sources in one OFDM symbol. To specify how relay-source pairs should be assigned, we propose two practical relay-assignment schemes, including fixed-location scheme in which the relays are fixed at optimum locations, and centralized-control scheme in which the relays are assigned by the central node. We provide outage probability analysis of the proposed protocol in wireless indoor environment. Moreover, a lower bound on the outage probability of any relay-assignment schemes is established, and the performance of the proposed relay-assignment schemes is analyzed. We also investigate the application of the proposed protocol to enhance the performance of UWB systems. In UWB wireless indoor scenarios, both theoretical and simulation results show that the proposed cooperative protocol can achieve 75% power saving and 200% coverage extension compared to the noncooperative UWB system proposed in the IEEE 802.15.3a standard