A cooperative phase steering scheme in multi-relay node environments

We propose a decode-and-forward (DF) based cooperative phase steering scheme and analyze its outage probability. The cooperative phase steering scheme is to make the received signals from multiple relay nodes co-phased at a destination node by pre-adjusting the phase differences.With a reasonable amount of feedback information from a destination node, the cooperative phase steering scheme circumvents the drawbacks of conventional cooperative diversity techniques such as maximal ratio combining (MRC) reception, maximal ratio transmission (MRT), and opportunistic relay selection schemes. Our analytical and simulation results show that the cooperative phase steering scheme outperforms the opportunistic relay selection scheme and approaches the MRT scheme known as a theoretically optimal cooperative diversity technique. It is also shown that cooperative phase steering has sufficient robustness to phase incoherence.