Performance Analysis of Coded Cooperation over Time-Variant Channels

We contribute to the evaluation of the performance of a relaying technique called coded cooperation. This cooperation scheme involves two or more mobile stations (MS) that reciprocally transmit portions of their codewords through independent fading channels so as to achieve diversity. Performance analysis in the literature considers two extreme cases of temporal variability for the fading channel: the block fading (BF) model for channels that remain constant during the transmission of the whole codeword and the fast fading (FF) one for independent identically distributed channel gains over the time. In this paper we extend the analysis to more realistic propagation scenarios where the channel response varies over the time with a correlation function that depends on the MSs’ velocity. We derive analytical bounds on the average bit error probability and we validate the results by numerical simulations for a varying degree of channel correlation, ranging from the BF to the FF case. Numerical results show that the performance gain provided by the cooperation with respect to the non-cooperative case decreases as the MSs move faster.