Outage Probability Analysis of a Coded Cooperative OFDM System in Multipath Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper considers a cooperative space-frequency (SF) coded OFDM system and evaluates its performance over quasi-static frequency selective Rayleigh fading channels. An expression for exact outage error probability is derived and its tight closed form lower bound is presented. The tightness of the lower bound is demonstrated through the Monte Carlo simulations. The asymptotic analysis indicates that the proposed protocol achieves full spatial and frequency diversities available in the cooperative communication system. The theoretical analysis of the proposed space-frequency coded cooperation protocol is further confirmed by computer simulations.