Title: Cooperative Diversity Protocols: A Literature Survey

Year of Publication: 2015
Page Numbers: 64-76
Authors: Imran Ullah Khan
Conference Name: The International Conference on Electrical and Electronic Engineering Telecommunication Engineering, and Mechatronics (EEETEM2015)
- Malaysia

Abstract:


Over the last decade, the wireless cooperative networks has matured reasonably, and there has been extensive research on various areas related to wireless cooperative networks such as designing of different cooperative diversity protocols and their performance. The quantity of research being conducted in this area has been increased dramatically in the past few years, due to increasing interest in virtually seeking the advantages of MIMO spatial diversity. Therefore, our aim was to review different cooperative diversity protocols with various issues. Our study is based on three sections i.e., information theoretical, physical and medium access control (MAC) layers approaches. It is indicated that information theoretical approaches can be used to improve the performance of cooperative diversity networks, in terms of high data rate and decreased sensitivity. Moreover, different models at physical layer can be used to exploit spatial diversity, to improve the coding gains and to support the user cooperation between users at the price of lower hardware and spectral costs. It is expressed that MAC layer plays an important role in finding alternative ways, in order to maintain coordination among relays. Most of the MAC protocols are based on distributive coordination function (DCF) IEEE 802.11 standards, which do not provide the coordination among relays. Consequently, further improvement can be done by using cooperative MAC and routing protocols together, to support cooperation among neighbor’s nodes and to minimize transmit energy consumption in the cooperative network. We believe that this paper will fulfill the basic needs in informing the students, engineers and researcher, in getting familiar with this abundant recent research area of cooperative networks, and getting starting research in this area.