Performance study of a new cooperative protocol in Rician fading channels

Cooperative diversity techniques increase the performance of wireless communication systems at the expense of reducing the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we introduce our new cooperative or relaying protocol and investigate its performance in Rician fading channel conditions. Our protocol is proposed for a cooperative network with practically attractive decode and forward (DF) relays which improves the spectral efficiency while keeping the advantages of cooperative diversity. This protocol keeps the transmission rate fixed to the rate of point-to-point transmission and outperforms conventional relaying protocols such as fixed, selection and incremental relaying protocols even over practical Rician fading channels. The simulation results show the effectiveness of our method and confirm our claim.