Cooperative Systems for the Fading Channel with Adaptive Modulation and Incremental Encoding

Cooperation may be used to exploit the spatial diversity provided by independently faded antenna systems. In a cooperative scenario, incremental redundancy and adaptive modulation may be used to improve the system performance. This paper presents and uses an approximated theoretical framework for designing and evaluating the performance of a decode and forward (DF) cooperative system adopting efficient encoding techniques. The proposed framework may be used to model both incremental redundancy and adaptive modulation. The analytical results are compared with simulation results, to assess their accuracy.