Cooperative coding using serial concatenated convolutional codes

The paper presents a novel cooperative coding scheme using punctured serial concatenated convolutional codes (SCCC). We evaluate its performance in terms of frame error rate (FER) under two cooperation protocols: a decode-and-forward protocol in conjunction with automatic repeat request (ARQ), by which the relay sends an acknowledge bit (ACK) back to the source to indicate whether its data packet is correctly decoded; an adaptive amplify-and-forward protocol, where the amplifying relay node cooperates to forward the message only when the inter-user link gain is above a certain threshold. In both cases, the destination makes the decision on each transmitted bit after appropriately combining signals and performing iterative decoding. Simulation results show that SCCC-based cooperative coding achieves full spatial diversity and exhibits a similar FER performance to that using parallel concatenated convolutional codes (PCCC). At the price of channel feedback, the adaptive decode-and-forward algorithm demonstrates a relatively lower FER than the adaptive amplify-and-forward scheme. Amplified cooperation experiences severe performance degradation due to the inefficiency of repetition coding and error propagation, especially when the quality of the source-relay link deteriorates; however, if the threshold for carrying cooperation is carefully selected, the adaptive amplify-and-forward protocol can perform comparably to the decode-and-forward protocol.