A Novel Protocol for Cooperative Diversity in Wireless Networks

Recently, cooperative diversity has emerged as a means of providing gains from spatial diversity to devices with single antennas. Yet, the performance of these protocols remains limited in symmetric networks. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a novel “detached” cooperative diversity protocol that is designed for asymmetric networks, both in terms of outage probability and frame error rate. The influence of data rate, path loss, and network geometry on the performance of the proposed protocol is studied, and the usage region, in which cooperative schemes outperform direct transmission, is derived. Our results suggest that the novel cooperative diversity protocol outperforms non-cooperative transmission under a wide range of environment conditions and hence constitutes a viable option for future wireless networks.