Performance Analysis of Cooperative Networks with Random Decode-and-Forward Relaying

Cooperative diversity has recently emerged as novel communication scheme for future wireless communications because of diversity gain, which is achieved by sharing each cooperative user's antenna to form a virtual antenna array in the wireless network. Previous works on analysis of system performance of cooperative networks mainly focused on static scenarios. In this paper, we derive exact average symbol error rate (ASER) of a cooperative wireless transmission with adaptive decode-and-forward (DF) protocol [6], where the number of relays or cooperative user- nodes, n, which can correctly decode the received signal, is a random variable subject to the Poisson distribution, the normal distribution and the uniform distribution, respectively. Both the analytical and the numerical results corroborate that both diversity and coding gain will be affected by the relay- or user-node distribution. For the Poisson distribution and the normal distribution, the diversity gain is affected much than the coding gain. For the uniform distribution, the coding gain is affected whereas the diversity gain keeps fixed.