Characterization of the OFDM cooperative communication on the assumption IEEE802.11a

Multi-hop networks have been proposed as a new type of autonomous networks recently. Various multi-hop routings employ flooding mechanisms, where all terminals retransmit a same packet to a whole network to distribute information. It is well known that flooding mechanisms consume a lot of wireless resources. Additionally, broadcast storm problems occur when a number of nodes or traffic increase in a network. The authors have proposed a new cooperative communication scheme focusing on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). We focus that OFDM receivers can demodulate some same OFDM symbols within guard interval (GI) period. Therefore, the proposed scheme employs multiple transmission of a same OFDM symbol from some senders. We have clarified that the proposed scheme is effective in multi-hop networks from the fundamental evaluation. However, the evaluation is not enough to explain the effectiveness in actual wireless device such as IEEE 802.11a/g because symbol structure of these standard is more complex. This paper evaluates the performance of the OFDM cooperative communication in case of the IEEE 802.11a standard. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can work well on the IEEE 802.11a device and can improve the bit error ratio performance.