On the Application of Cooperative Transmission to Wireless Broadcast Channels

In this paper, we study the application of cooperative diversity to wireless broadcast channels, a fundamental building block of wireless communication networks. Several cooperative broadcast protocols will be proposed, and information theoretic metrics are developed to facilitate performance evaluation. Provided that there is no direct S-D link, the proposed protocols can achieve a multiplexing gain close to one, whereas the traditional two-hop scheme can only achieve the diversity gain 1/2. Provided that there are direct S-D links, the proposed protocol can still outperform the comparable scheme, particularly at high multiplexing gains.