Abstract:
Cooperative diversity protocols promise a new dimension of diversity that
provides better communication by engaging nearby relays in forming a ‘virtual’ array
of antennas for combined signal transmission. The current incremental cooperative
diversity algorithms incrementally select best relay(s) to cooperate based on the channel
quality reported by the relays. However, the algorithms do not take into consideration
the fact that the chosen best relay(s) at estimation may not always be best at the time of
communication. This is due to the time delay between the relay selection and its
transmission of signal (problem of outdated Channel Quality Information). To solve this
problem, the concept of channel prediction is introduced and employed whereby each
relay determines a predicted value of its Channel Quality Information (CQI) based on
its past measurements. The paper therefore develops a novel predictive relay-selection
(PRS) cooperative diversity model which seeks to improve Land Mobile Satellite (LMS)
communication through prediction protocols. In the model, the chosen best relay is the
one with the best predicted CQI value instead of the traditional outdated one.
Performance analysis of outage probability and average bit error probability for the
newly developed PRS cooperation shows that the PRS cooperation is better than direct
and outdated CQI relay communication.
