A distributed coding cooperative scheme for wireless communications

Cooperative transmission schemes have recently been proposed to improve the uplink performance of wireless communications systems by increasing diversity without requiring use of multiple transmit antennas. We here propose a novel cooperative scheme that performs distributed coding of user data, uses only one channel per user and allows a flexible trade-off between rate and diversity, thus achieving higher data rates than previously proposed coded cooperative schemes. The point of operation of the system on the diversity-rate curve can be arbitrarily chosen according to the number of cooperating users. A trade-off is increased complexity as more users are required to be simultaneously decoded by the BS. We describe the construction of the distributed code for a n-user system, that results in reduced complexity decoding operations at the BS. The performance of the proposed method is studied via analytical bounds and numerical simulations.