Analyzing the effect of asymmetric mobility and channel configurations on the outage performance of coded cooperative systems

In future wireless networks, end-user nodes may cooperate to form logical links. By cooperation, even singleantenna nodes provide user cooperative diversity resulting in a performance gain comparable to multi-antenna systems. This gain is efficiently provided by cooperative coding schemes where users cooperate by mutually transmitting their code words. However, cooperation employs additional channels and users. This introduces further factors which may affect the performance gain. The number of these factors is significantly increased in asymmetric scenarios where all users move and channels fade independently. In this paper, we analyze the effect of these new factors using 2 factorial design-based simulations and show that, partially contrary to intuition, only some of them are significant. For the remaining significant factors we study the effect of factor combinations and provide more detailed simulation results. Based on this evaluation, we finally derive guidelines for further optimizing cooperative coding in asymmetric scenarios.