Space time coded cooperative communication with joint antenna and relay selection

Although multiple antenna and cooperative communication techniques can increase the system capacity, it can be difficult to use them in practice because of their high complexity. In this paper,” joint transmit/receive antenna and relay selection” is proposed to keep the bit error rate and complexity low in cooperative communication. It is assumed that there are multiple users with multiple antennas where only one relay is selected between the source and the destination. Space time block coded (STBC) information is sent through the selected channel where the selection criterion is to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed model results in lower bit error rates than only relay or antenna selection which are studied in the literature.