Link performance prediction methods for cooperative relaying in wireless networks

Next generation wireless networks are likely to include cooperative relaying in their design. The performance of certain cooperation schemes in realistic scenarios should be evaluated by system level simulations (SLS). Moreover, the link adaptation (LA) and radio resource management become more complex, since cooperation schemes involve transmissions on more than one link and joint processing at the receiver. Both LA and SLS require quality metrics of the composite cooperative links, which capture the performance of the transmission scheme. This paper proposes performance prediction methods which rely on mutual information based metrics for two cooperation schemes which use one relay. Simulations show that, yet simple, these methods are accurate in predicting the coded block error rate (BLER).