Impact of Relay Location on the performance of Multi-Relay Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communications is a new wireless communication technique which allows single antenna mobiles to share their antennas and to produce virtual multiple antenna system. We investigate the impact of relay location on the SER and system capacity for multi relay (amplify and forward) cooperative network in terms of distance and obtained the best relay location analytically. The impact of relay location according to SER performance and system capacity is discussed by using linear topology with equal power allocation. From the simulation results, the better position of the relay is in the midway distance between the source and destination. The performance for the closest to source relay is good. On the other hand, the system performance degrades when the relay located close to destination. Through simulation results, it is shown that the error rate performance of the system increases quite remarkably with increase in the number of relays. KeywordsAmplify and forward Relays, Maximal ratio combining, SER.