Improving the design of relay nodes for cooperative opportunistic beamforming

Cooperative opportunistic beamforming (CoopOBF) uses a relay node to augment channel fading in order to improve the multi-user diversity achieved using opportunistic scheduling. This paper discusses a very simple, all analog CoopOBF relay prototype capable of reflecting and amplifying the source node signal while, at the same time, imposing an arbitrary phase shift on that signal. Performance measurements collected from the prototype will be used in simulation to evaluate CoopOBF performance. These simulations will also be used to illustrate how best to improve the current relay hardware design in order to maximize the capacity improvement achieved when using CoopOBF.