Enhancing wireless networks performance through cooperative communications with interference management

Cooperative radio communication has been proposed as an efficient technique to extend coverage and improve throughput in future wireless networks. However, its performance gain is degraded in the presence of co-channel interference. In this paper, we introduce an efficient cooperative communications scheme which maximizes the received signal to noise ratio (SNR) while keeping the interference levels below a certain threshold. The introduced scheme is based on two relay selection methods: max(link2) which is based on maximizing the SNR of the second hop, and max(e2e) which aims to maximize the end-to-end SNR of the relayed link. We derive exact closed form expressions for the probability density function (PDF) of the SNR, outage probability, average capacity, and average bit error probability for the introduced cooperative schemes. Simulations are used to validate the analytical results and an agreement is observed. The results confirm the advantage of the introduced cooperation schemes in enhancing interference management.