Cooperative Diversity for Virtual MIMO System in the Presence of Spatial Correlated Fading Model

In the existing papers on cooperative diversity, the fading channels are idealistically assumed to be Rayleigh fading channel. Taking into account the realistic propagation environments in the presence of spatial fading correlation, the performance of cooperative protocols using distributed space-time block code (DSTBC) in the two-ring scattering model is analyzed. The time division multiple access scheme is proposed with half duplex mode. Cooperative scheme is proposed, because cooperative diversity can combat the fading correlation by spatial decorrelation which is produced by independent multipaths and scattering paths between source nodes (SNs) and destination nodes (DNs). Cooperative relaying is shown to increase the link stability (or, alternatively, decrease the link outage probability) significantly. Therefore, the outage capacity and average bit error rate (BER) of cooperation are presented by applying various cooperative schemes in the correlated channel. Based on theoretical analyses and simulation results, the cooperative diversity yields significant performance gain in correlated channel, i.e., reducing the spatial correlation of each path and enhancing the overall performance of virtual MIMO system by high quality of cooperative interuser channel.