A study on effect of interference in cooperative communication

The motivation behind cooperative communication has been to exploit the benefits of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in an otherwise unlikely scenario. In a system where implementing multiple antennas is impractical, cooperative communication allows a form of transmit diversity to occur by cooperation among other single antenna users, thus creating a virtual antenna array. However, little work has been done that deals with the effect of interference on such systems. This paper explains how a transmit diversity scenario of unequal path gains for the same interferer occurs when participating nodes have the ability to cancel interference, thereby increasing system performance in terms of total link SER.