Transmission Protocol for Cooperative MIMO with Full Rate: Design and Analysis

In this paper, we propose two different types of cooperative transmission protocols, referred to as spatial multiplexing with receive diversity (SMRD), that can support a full rate, i.e., one symbol transmission per each time slot. We show that the BER performance can be significantly improved with a proper design of SMRD under the AF (amplify-and-forward) mode of relaying, when there is no interference among all symbols transmitted in the same time slot. Furthermore, we consider a more practical implementation of SMRD with successive interference cancellation (SIC) to deal with co-channel interference. Our simulation result shows that the proposed transmission protocol achieves 6 dB gain over the case of noncooperation (direct transmission) without any bandwidth expansion.