Diversity Gains for Different Cooperative Schemes on Fast Fading Channels

The use of single-antenna terminals for coherent cooperative wireless communications has received more attention in literature than for non-coherent communications. But acquiring knowledge of the fading coefficients in a cooperative scheme is very challenging in a fast fading case. In this paper, we develop several cooperative schemes suited for systems which do not require channel state information at either relays or destination. We analyze the performance of these schemes in terms of diversity gain and error probability. The diversity gained with an equal gain combiner at the destination is investigated too. The proposed cooperative schemes are compared to the literature and are shown to achieve significant performance gain depending on the type of relaying protocol.