Cooperative Communications: A New Trend in the Wireless World

This Wireless channel while offering independence of movement also introduces un-reliability in the messages received at the destination. Various strategies have been introduced so far to mitigate the effects of the channel on the message received. In this paper, we give an introductory overview of cooperative communications, a new trend in this field of wireless Communications where the transmitting users help each other to overcome the Effects of wireless channel on the message received at the destination. We compare the new idea of cooperative communications with traditional direct or noncooperative communications. In particular, we discuss the achievable rates and simulate the system to get the probability of outage performance of cooperative communications and compare it with direct or noncooperative communications. Keywords-Cooperative Communications, Coded Cooperation, Amplify-and-Forward, Decode-and-Forward, Compress-and-Forward, Probability of Outage