Enhanced MIMO cooperative communication based on signal space diversity

Cooperative communication enables collaborate mobile terminals to share each other´s antennas to construct a virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. Through partitioning a user´s code word into two parts, coded cooperation (CC) method integrates cooperation with channel coding and significantly improves the performance. In this paper, CC method is extended to spatial-multiplexing-based MIMO system that terminals and base station (BS) are all equipped with multiple antennas. On the basis of MIMO CC scheme, an enhanced cooperative communication scheme based on signal space diversity (SSD) is proposed. Through jointly using the components interleaver in spatial-multiplexing-based MIMO and mechanism of user collaboration, it can increase the diversity order and achieve impressive gains compared to non-cooperative system and MIMO CC scheme in slow fading channel while maintaining the same information rate, transmit power and bandwidth.