Bandwidth Efficient Three-User Cooperative Diversity Scheme Based on Relaying Superposition Symbols

Recently, Cooperative diversity in wireless communication systems has gained much attention. A simple two-user cooperative diversity scheme called decode-and-forward cooperation scheme has been presented by Laneman (2004). Each user has one partner to decode its information and retransmit it by employing repetition coding. This scheme can offer diversity order of two. But the bandwidth efficiency is low. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth efficient three-user cooperative diversity scheme based on relaying superposition symbols. Each user has two partners and each partner relays superposition symbols of the other two users instead of repetition. Thus, the bandwidth efficiency is improved compared to the baseline decodeand-forward cooperative diversity scheme presented by Laneman. Moreover, the proposed scheme can also offer diversity order of two. Then, in order to improve the system performance, a new constellation labeling for the superposition 8PSK modulation is designed. It is a simple way to exploit the symbol mapping diversity and a gain of about 2 dB can be obtained. Furthermore, the performance improvement comes at no additional power or bandwidth expense.