On the Capacity of Cooperative Communication in Correlated Fading Channels

We investigate the performance of the protocols for cooperative communications, such as amplify-forward and decode-forward, in correlated fading channels. Our analytical and simulation results show that correlation can have varied effects on the capacity, compared to the uncorrelated cases. If the quality of the source-destination channel is better, in terms of the variances of the fading coefficients, than that of the source-relay channel, correlation may cause degradation in the capacity. Otherwise, cooperation between terminals in correlated fading channels could offer more capacity than in the uncorrelated scenarios.