The Resource-Optimized Differentially Modulated Hybrid AF/DF Cooperative Cellular Uplink

In multi-user cellular uplinks cooperating mobiles may share their antennas in order to achieve transmit diversity by formig a virtual antenna array (VAA) in a distributed fashion. In this paper, based on the minimum BER criterion, we investigate cooperating-user-selection (CUS) and adaptive-power-allocation (APA) for two types of differentially modulated cooperative cellular uplinks requiring no channel state information (CSI) at the receiver, namely, for the differential-amplify-and-forward (DAF) and the selective differential-decode-and-forward (DDF) assisted systems. More specifically, we investigate the cooperative-protocol-selection (CPS) of the uplink system in conjunction with a beneficial CUS as well as the APA scheme in order to further improve the achievable end-to-end performance, leading to a resource-optimized hybrid cooperative system. Hence, a number of cooperating MSs may be adaptively selected from the available MS candidate pool and the cooperative protocol employed by a specific cooperating MS may also be adaptively selected in the interest of achieving the best possible BER performance.