Relay-assisted Multiple Access Channel Protocol for Cooperative Diversity

Cooperative diversity is a novel technique to improve diversity gains, capacity gains, and energy saving. This technique involves multiple terminals sharing resources in order to build a virtual antenna array in a distributed fashion. In this paper, we propose a multi-user cooperative diversity protocol called Relay-assisted Multiple Access Channel(R-MAC) that allows multiple source terminals to transmit their signals simultaneously and the relay terminal forwards the aggregated signal received from the source terminals to the destination terminal. The proposed protocol converts the distributed antenna channels into an effective MIMO channel by exploiting a relay, increasing both diversity gain and system throughput. We investigate the performance of the proposed protocol in terms of outage probability and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff where we assume block fading channel environment. Our simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms direct transmission in the high spectral efficiency regime where the conventional cooperative diversity protocols cannot outperform direct transmission.