Low outage probability throughput improvement for cooperative wireless networks by utilizing channel state information

Cooperative communications is an attractive feature for the upcoming high speed wireless networks. It provides diversity for devices that are incapable of harboring multiple antennae by emulating multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system providing virtual antenna array. There are different strategies of cooperation already such as amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF). Although the implementation of these strategies is simple, their utilization of the channel state information (CSI) for performance improvement is generally poor. As a result, alternative strategies are required to improve the throughput while keeping the outage and bit error rate (BER) low. In this paper an approach, based on previously existing strategies, called CSI directed estimate and forward (CDEF) strategy is proposed to improve throughput at low outage probability. It will be shown that this new strategy attains better BER and outage performances compared to AF and DF. Simulation results also show that it has better throughput performance at low outage probability as well.