Cooperative Communication Using Complementary Punctured Convolutional (CPC) Codes over Wireless Fading Channels

Recently, cooperative communication has been proposed to provide diversity, thereby improving the performance of wireless networks. In this paper, we develop two transmission methods for cooperative networks that need to exchange no or a minimum amount of information among cooperating nodes and the source node to coordinate cooperative transmissions. We then investigate the bit error rate performance of complementary punctured convolutional (CPC) codes, when they are applied to our two cooperating transmission schemes. Our simulation results demonstrate that cooperative communication can improve the BER performance significantly, and our cooperation scheme II offers better performance than cooperation scheme I, because it uses a better node selection method, although it does not need any signaling overhead.