Cooperative Diversity in CDMA over Nakagami−m Fading Channels

Spatial diversity can be employed by sending copies of the transmitted signal using multiple antennas at the transmitter/receiver, as implemented in multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) systems. Spatial receive diversity has already been used in many applications with centralized systems where base station receivers are equipped with multiple antennas. However, due to the power constraints and the small size of the mobile terminal, it may not be feasible to deploy multiple transmit antennas. User cooperation diversity, a new form of space diversity, has been developed to address these limitations. Recently, user cooperative diversity has gained more attention as a less complex alternative to centralized MIMO wireless systems. It revealed the ability to improve wireless communications through reliable reception. One common network of the user cooperation diversity is the direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) in which the Rayleigh fading channels are adopted and the orthogonality between users is assumed. The Rayleigh fading channels are unrealistic since they cannot represent the statistical characteristics of the complex indoor environments. On the other hand, Nakagami-m fading model is well known as a generalized distribution, where many fading environments can be modeled. It can be used to model fading conditions ranging from severe, light to no fading, by changing its fading parameter m. The bit-error-rate (BER) and outage probability of uplink cooperative DS-CDMA over Nakagami-m has not been addressed in the literature. Thus, in this thesis, the performance of both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative asynchronous DS-CDMA system over Nakagami-m fading channels is investigated. The Rake receiver is used to exploit the advantages of multipath propagation. Besides, multiuser detection (MUD) is used to mitigate the effect of multiple-access interference (MAI). We show that our proposed multi-user system achieves the full system diversity gain. The first part of the thesis introduces a new closed-form expression for the outage probability and the error probability of the DF cooperative DS-CDMA over asynchronous transmission over independent non-identical Nakagami-m fading channels. The underlying system employs MUD such as minimum mean square error (MMSE) and decorrelator detector (DD) to achieve the full diversity. The aforementioned closed-form expression is obtained through the moment generating function (MGF) for the total signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the base station where the cumulative density function (CDF) is obtained. Furthermore, we investigate the asymptotic behavior of the system at high SNR to calculate the achievable diversity gain. The results demonstrate that the system diversity gain is fulfilled when MUD is used to mitigate the effect of MAI. In the second part of the thesis, we study the performance of cooperative CDMA system using AF relaying over independent non-identical distribution (i.n.i) Nakagami-m fading channels. Using the MGF of the total SNR at the base station, we derive the outage probability of the system. This enables us to derive the asymptotic outage probability for any arbitrary value of the fading parameter m. The last part of the thesis investigates the optimum power allocation and optimum relay location in AF cooperative CDMA systems over i.n.i Nakagami-m fading channels. Moreover, we introduce the joint optimization of both power allocation and relay location under the transmit power constraint to minimize the outage probability of the system. The joint optimization of both power allocation and relay location is used to minimize the outage performance of the system, thereby achieving full diversity gain