Opportunistic cooperative diversity with feedback and cheap radios

Abstract

Practical cooperative diversity protocols often rely on low-cost radios that treat multiple in-band signals as noise and thus require strictly orthogonal transmissions. We analyze the performance of a class of opportunistic relaying protocols that employ simple packet level feedback and strictly orthogonal transmissions. It is shown that the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of the proposed protocols either matches or outperforms the multi-input-single-output (MISO), zero-feedback performance. These gains indicate that low complexity radios and feedback could be an appealing architecture for future user cooperation protocols.