Multi-source cooperation with full-diversity spectral-efficiency and controllable-complexity

A general framework is developed for multi-source cooperation (MSC) protocols to improve diversity and spectral efficiency relative to repetition based alternatives that rely on single-source cooperation. The novel protocols are flexible to balance tradeoffs among diversity, spectral efficiency and decoding-complexity. Users are grouped in clusters and follow a two-phase MSC protocol which involves time division multiple access (TDMA) to separate users within a cluster, and code division multiple access (CDMA) used to separate clusters. An attractive protocol under the general MSC framework relies on distributed complex field coding (DCFC) to enable diversity order equal to the number of users per cluster. Cluster separation based on orthonormal spreading sequences leads to spectral efficiency 1/2. When the number of clusters exceeds the amount of spreading, spectral efficiency can be enhanced without sacrificing diversity, at the expense of controllable increase in complexity. Simulations corroborate our analytical claims