Performance Evaluation of Cooperative Relaying Networks Using 3D Ray Launching Method for Wireless Propagation Prediction

Cooperative relaying is a promising technique for multihop wireless networks to exploit spatial diversity. Most of the studies of multihop relaying assumed a simple i.i.d. Rayleigh fading model. In this case, there is no correlation of phase and amplitude among the received signals. However, this assumption is not always fulfilled in practice. For instance, the transmission distance in multihop wireless transmission is supposed to be a close range and the shadowing effect needs to be taken into account. The ray launching method based on geometrical optics is a technique for estimating a deterministic propagation channel. In this paper, 3D ray launching method is used for wireless propagation prediction. By computer simulations, the performance of 2-hop cooperative relaying with two relay stations is investigated. The simulation-based performance analysis confirms that the cooperative relaying scheme has an advantage of diversity gain thus improving the bit error ratio performance.