Experimental Investigation of Cooperative Schemes on a Real-Time DSP-Based Testbed

Experimental results on the well-known cooperating relaying schemes, amplify-and-forward (AF), detect-and-forward (DF), cooperative maximum ratio combining (CMRC), and distributed space-time coding (DSTC), are presented in this paper. A novel relaying scheme named “selection relaying” (SR), in which one of two relays are selected base on path-loss, is also tested. For all schemes except AF receive antenna diversity is as an option which can be switched on or off. For DF and DSTC a feature “selective” where the relay only forwards frames with a receive SNR above 6 dB is introduced. In our measurements, all cooperative relaying schemes above increase the coverage area as compared with direct transmission. The features “antenna diversity” and “selective” improve the performance. Good performance is obtained with CMRC, DSTC, and SR.