Cooperative Communication with Relay Network

Abstract

Wireless channels suffer severely from the effect of multi-path and fading. To mitigate these effects cooperative diversity protocols are used. In cooperative diversity, two or more users share their antennas to create a virtual MIMO system. Hence in cooperative communication several single antenna relays assist the transmission between a source and a destination. In this thesis Matlab program was used to simulate the performance of the cooperative communication protocols; Amplify and Forward (AF), Decode and Forward (DF) and Quantize and Forward (QF). The received signals at the destination were combined using the Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) technique. The performance of the cooperative communication protocols was simulated for a single relay and multi relay in Rayleigh fading channel, using M-ary Phase Shift Keying (M-PSK). The results showed that the Quantize and Forward (QF) had the best performance in one relay and two relay compared to the Amplify and Forward (AF) and Decode and Forward (DF) when using BPSK, QPSK and 8PSK.