Adaptive multi-carrier cooperative communication technique

In this paper, we propose adaptive multi-carrier cooperative communication (MCCC) technique for multi-path fading channels. In the proposed system, the nodes cooperatively transmit data over adaptively allocated sub-carriers to maximize the spectral efficiency while improving the bit error rate performance. Two adaptive sub-carrier allocation strategies are introduced. In the first strategy, the sub-carriers are selected solely based on the channel gain while in the second strategy the sub-carriers are allocated using both channel gains and distance measure between the nodes. It is shown that the proposed technique has a better bit error rate performance and spectral efficiency compared with adaptive and none adaptive OFDM systems.