Cooperative communication : efficient schemes and practical aspects

Cooperation has been considered as a key strategy to cater for the ever increasing demand for high data rate wireless communication. Over the past few years, researches in this area have seen a tremendous growth and advancement, where various cooperation strategies were proposed for different communication scenarios. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate the significance of cooperation in improving transmission quality, in which both cooperative broadcasting as well as cooperative relaying context are taken into consideration. An emphasis on the efficiency and practical aspects of different schemes are then given, and novel techniques to improve on both aspects are proposed. In cooperative broadcast communication where each node is equipped with multiple antennas, it is shown that antenna selection can provide an effective solution for hardware complexity and space limitation issues inherent to multi antenna systems. A novel selection scheme for cooperative broadcast communication is then proposed. The scheme takes advantage of uplink-downlink duality to reduce computational requirement while still achieving most of the gain available. Starting from the single user system, a sub optimal selection strategy is proposed for multicarrier systems as well. Combining with the earlier method developed for cooperative broadcast scenario, effective antenna selection scheme for multicarrier broadcast systems is obtained. Complexity analysis is given to justify its practical aspect, and its performance when applied to Broadband Wireless Access system based on IEEE 802.16 is studied.DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (SCE