A Pragmatic Approach to Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communication represents an effective way of introducing spatial diversity in wireless networks. Full performance gain of an ideal cooperative communication system requires the cooperating transmitters to form their signals such that the destination receiver is able to coherently combine the desired signals. This encompasses multiple implementation challenges. We introduce a more pragmatic approach to cooperative diversity based on modern error correction coding working with phase dithering. Modulation constrained information rate analysis for this approach is presented, and we show that the loss relative to the ideal cooperative diversity scheme is minimal. By incorporating further practical constraints, we show performance of block-oriented phase dithering within a quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel