Relay selection cooperative diversity in Land Mobile Satellite Systems

In recent times, the cooperative diversity concept has been a major research area as it promises improvement in communication with little complexity and resource demands. In this work, the cooperative diversity concept is investigated in Land Mobile Satellite Systems (LMSS). Using a two-state statistical LMSS satellite model, the algorithm seeks to choose a best relay with highest received signal strength to cooperate with the destination terminal. This receiver-based cooperation is also carried out incrementally, that is, only when the direct communication is insufficient to guarantee good communication is cooperation employed. This helps to save resources even more as less spectrum bandwidth and relay power would be utilized. The following performance criteria were considered; Average Output Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), Outage Probability, Average Bit Error Rate and Average Channel Capacity for the cooperative Satellite system. The results show that for LMSS, cooperative communication performs better than direct communication alone, irrespective of the environment so considered.