Cooperative Phase Sweep Amplify-and-Forward Transmission

This work presents a new amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative multiple input multiple output (MIMO) transmission scheme based on phase sweep transmit diversity. In a single hop cooperative link, the relay node imposes a phase sweep on the signal it receives from the source node. This phase sweeping causes fast fading when the signals from the source and relay nodes combine at the destination. On low velocity or static links, this fast fading improves channel code performance. The method used to implement the phase sweeping results in a relay node design that is much simpler than other AF schemes while still providing a comparable performance improvement.