DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics

and Theoretical Computer Science

Cooperative Communication in Wireless Systems

Elza Erkip, Andrew Sendonaris, Andrej Stefanov, and Behnaam Aazhang

Abstract. The broadcast nature of wireless communications suggests that

a source signal transmitted towards the destination can be “overheard” at
neighboring nodes. Cooperative communication refers to processing of this
overheard information at the surrounding nodes and retransmission towards
the destination to create spatial diversity, thereby to obtain higher throughput
and reliability. In this paper we describe information theoretic models suit-
able for cooperation, study achievable rate regions and outage probabilities,
and describe channel coding techniques that allow us to exploit the diversity
advantages of cooperation.

1. Introduction
Ad-hoc wireless networks are based on multi-hop communications, where the
information from the source to the destination is relayed via other mobiles. An
ad-hoc network does not have a fixed infrastructure, so this relaying operation is
essential in order to overcome the path loss incurred over large distances. Multi-
hop ideas are also utilized in cellular and wireless LAN systems to provide higher
quality of service, power savings and extended coverage.
Information theory of multi-hop communication dates back to the relay channel
model, which contains a source, a destination and a relay whose goal is to facilitate
information transfer from the source to the destination. The relay channel was
introduced by Van der Meulen [23] and investigated extensively by Cover and El
Gamal [3]. Cover and El Gamal provided a number of relaying strategies, found
achievable regions and provided upper bounds to the capacity of a general relay
channel. They also provided an expression for the capacity of the degraded relay
channel, in which the communication channel between the source and the relay is
physically better than the source-destination link. The capacity of the general relay
channel is still unknown. Motivated by the recent interest in multi-hop, a number
of recent papers investigate the use of multiple relays. Some relevant references
include [7, 8, 9, 15, 18, 19, 26].
Even though the information theoretic model allows for the destination to listen
to both the source and the relay, in most multi-hop systems the destination only
processes the signal coming from the relay. This is justified in a wireless channel

Key words and phrases. Multi-access communication, fading channels, diversity.

The first author was supported in part by NSF Grant No. CAREER-0093163.

c
0000 (copyright holder)

1
2 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

where path loss has the dominant effect. Since the source is generally further away
from the destination than the relay, the received signal at the destination due to
the source would be much weaker than the relay signal. However, when fading is
also taken into account, this scheme would incur considerable loss, especially in
diversity, compared to one in which the destination processes both signals. Hence
one can use multi-hop not just to overcome path loss, but also to provide diversity.
Motivated by the above observation, cooperative communication involves two
main ideas: (i) Use relays (or multi-hop) to provide spatial diversity in a fading
environment, (ii) Envision a collaborative scheme where the relay also has its own
information to send so both terminals help one another to communicate by acting
as relays for each other (called “partners”).
One can think of a cooperative system as a virtual antenna array, where each
antenna in the array corresponds to one of the partners. The partners can overhear
each other’s transmissions though the wireless medium, process this information
and re-transmit to collaborate. This provides extra observations of the source
signals at the destinations, the observations which are dispersed in space and usually
discarded by current implementations of cellular, wireless LAN or ad-hoc systems.
However, since the elements of this array are not co-located and are connected via
noisy, fading links, it is not clear a priori how much the benefits of this cooperation
would be. Our goal in this paper is to argue that the benefits, in terms of achievable
data rates, diversity and error performance, are significant. In our discussion, we
briefly describe some of our prior and ongoing work along with relevant literature,
and provide directions for future research. We first provide an information theoretic
model to describe the cooperative system, a set of achievable rates and an outage
probability analysis. Then we talk about how one can design and analyze channel
codes that can exploit the predicted benefits of a cooperative system.

2. Information Theoretic Model and Analysis

For ease of exposure, we consider a cooperative system consisting of two source
terminals denoted by T1 and T2 . These terminals could communicate with a com-
mon destination (such as a cooperative system in cellular) or more generally could
have separate destinations. Even though the cooperative concept is equally ap-
plicable to both cases, we will constrain ourselves to the common destination case
for the analysis. Our model is illustrated in Figure 1. Mathematically we have the
discrete-time model
(2.1) Y0 = K10 X1 + K20 X2 + Z0
(2.2) Y1 = K21 X2 + Z1
(2.3) Y2 = K12 X1 + Z2
where Y0 denotes the signal received at the common destination, Y1 and Y2 denote
the overheard signals at each of the partners and X1 and X2 represent the signals
transmitted by terminal 1 and 2 respectively at a particular time instant t. The
noise terms Z0 , Z1 and Z2 are independent from each other and have iid complex
Gaussian samples in time with variances σi2 , i = 0, 1, 2 respectively. We assume
a flat fading Rayleigh channel with complex Gaussian channel gains Kij . The
gains K10 , K20 and K12 are independent as they correspond to different links. In
general, the relationship between K12 and K21 depends on how the partners access
the channel. We will assume that the channel between two partners is reciprocal
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 3

K10
W1 X1
E1
Y1
K12
Z2 Z0
Y0
Z1
K 21
Y2
W2 E2
X2 K 20

Figure 1. Block diagram of a fading Gaussian cooperative channel

leading to K12 = K21 . However, this assumption is not necessary for our results and
can be relaxed. For the achievable rate region, we use the notion of ergodic capacity,
so we do not make any assumptions about the time variations of the channel except
that they form an ergodic random process. When we consider outage probabilities
and frame error rates corresponding to particular channel codes, we will assume
that the channel varies slowly and is constant during the communication session.
We allow for both partners to transmit and receive at the same time and we
assume that each terminal can perform perfect echo cancelation. As illustrated
in equations (2.2) and (2.3) this leads to Y1 (Y2 ) having no contribution from X1
(X2 ). We also assume that both terminals are synchronized. Even though these
assumptions may not hold in a practical system, they are quite common in the infor-
mation theory literature and they allow us to investigate the fundamental benefits
of cooperation. We will argue in Section 3 that even when we relax some of these
assumptions, cooperative communication still provides considerable improvement
over non-cooperative systems.
All of the receivers have perfect channel state information, that is they can
exactly measure the channel gain of the incoming signals. For the achievable rate
region and outage probability analysis in this section, we also assume that there is
some partial channel state information at transmitters in the form of the phase of
the complex channel gains K10 and K20 . This allows the partners to form signals
that coherently combine at the destination. We relax this assumption in Section 3.

2.1. Achievable Rate Region. This section summarizes some of our results
from [20, 21]. We provide an achievable rate region for the two-user cooperative
model above. We make the observation that this model is contained in the multiple
access channel with generalized feedback which was analyzed for discrete memory-
less and Gaussian channels in [2, 24]. The achievability results will make use of the
signal structure of [24]. Our main contribution will be to illustrate the potential
diversity and throughput benefits of cooperation in a wireless network with varying
link qualities.
4 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

In general, causality of the system suggests that X1,t the signal transmitted by
T1 at time t can only depend on the message of T1 , W1 and what T1 has “over-
heard” so far, (Y1,1 , . . . , Y1,t−1 ). However, we will use a more restricted signaling
strategy based on superposition block Markov encoding [4], a technique which has
been successfully used in multi-user systems involving feedback or some form of an
inter-user link. We envision transmission for B blocks, each of length n. Both B
and n are assumed to be large. In fact, for the achievable rate region, n has to
be large enough to observe different fading levels so that ergodic capacity is the
right notion to use. In each block, both terminals transmit a new message. The
transmitted signal from T1 in block j depends on W1 (j), the message in that block
and (Y1 (1), . . . , Y1 (j − 1)), all the signals received up to and including block j − 1.
Note that Y1 (i) denotes n observations of the output signal in block i. The desti-
nation uses backward decoding [25, 27], that is starts decoding from the last block
and moves one by one to the first.
We next state the achievable region for the cooperative channel, and provide a
sketch of the proof which illustrates the signal structure. We then provide compar-
isons with the non-cooperative capacity region.
Theorem 2.1. An achievable rate region for the cooperative system given in (2.1)-
(2.3) is the closure of the convex hull of all rate pairs (R1 , R2 ) such that R1 =
R10 + R12 and R2 = R20 + R21 with
  
|K12 |2 P12
(2.4) R12 < E C
|K12 |2 P10 + σ12
  
|K21 |2 P21
(2.5) R21 < E C
|K21 |2 P20 + σ22
  
|K10 |2 P10
(2.6) R10 < E C
σ02
  
|K20 |2 P20
(2.7) R20 < E C
σ02
  
|K10 |2 P10 + |K20 |2 P20
(2.8) R10 + R20 < E C
σ02
(2.9)
  √ 
|K10 |2 P1 + |K20 |2 P2 + 2|K10 ||K20 | PU 1 PU 2
R10 + R20 + R12 + R21 < E C ,
σ02
for some power assignment satisfying P1 = P10 + P12 + PU 1 , P2 = P20 + P21 + PU 2 .
The function C(x) = 12 log(1 + x) is the capacity of an additive white Gaussian
noise channel with signal to noise ratio x and E denotes expectation with respect
to the fading parameters Kij .
Proof. The proof follows [24]. Here we sketch it briefly to illustrate the signal
structure and decoding scheme.
In the cooperative system, unlike the degraded relay channel, one cannot ensure
the partner will always be able to receive more information than the destination.
Hence for every block j, T1 divides its information W1 (j) into two parts, one to
be relayed through the partner (W12 (j) at rate R12 ), the other to be transmitted
directly to the destination (W10 (j) at rate R10 ). The transmitted signal X1 consists
of three parts X10 , used to send W10 , X12 used to send W12 , and U1 which ensures
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 5

cooperation. The respective powers allocated to these signal components are P10 ,
P12 and PU 1 . We have
p
(2.10) X10 (j) = P10 X̃10 (W10 (j), W12 (j − 1), W21 (j − 1))
p
(2.11) X12 (j) = P12 X̃12 (W12 (j), W12 (j − 1), W21 (j − 1))
p
(2.12) U1 (j) = PU 1 e−jθ10 Ũ(W12 (j − 1), W21 (j − 1)),
with X1 (j) = X10 (j) + X12 (j) + U1 (j) and P1 = P10 + P12 + PU 1 . We assume
K10 = |K10 |ejθ10 , hence θ10 is the phase of the complex fading between T1 and the
destination. Here X1 (j) denotes n transmitted symbols for block j. The entries of
the random codebooks are generated by choosing X̃10 , X̃12 and Ũ independently,
all consisting of n iid samples of N (0, 1) distribution. The signal transmitted by
T2 , X2 (j), is generated in a similar fashion. Note that Ũ is used by both terminals
in their codebooks.
We observe that the signal X1 (j) not only depends on W1 (j) = (W10 (j), W12 (j)),
but also on W12 (j − 1) and W21 (j − 1). Obviously, T1 knows W12 (j − 1). We will
also ensure that R21 , the rate of transmission for W21 , is chosen so that W21 can
be perfectly recovered at T1 . Therefore at block j (W12 (j − 1), W21 (j − 1)) will be
known at both terminals and can be used to form the basis for cooperation.
In order to find out the conditions on R12 (R21 ) for perfect recovery of W12
(W21 ) at the partner, we first look at block 1. We assume (W12 (0), W21 (0)) = (0, 0).
Terminal 2 receives Y2 (1) = (Y2,1 (1), Y2,2 (1), . . . , Y2,n (1)) where Y2,t (1) is given by
equation (2.3) for all t = 1, . . . , n. The signal X1 (1) depends on W12 (0) and W21 (0)
both of which are known, W12 (1) which T2 is interested in, and W10 (1) which T2
will not attempt to find out. Using the representation in equations (2.10)-(2.12),
we observe that U1 (1) is known and hence can be canceled, X10 (j) will be treated
as noise and X12 (1) will be decoded at terminal 2. Assuming the fading is ergodic
over the block length n, provided that
  
|K12 |2 P12
R12 < E C ,
|K12 |2 P10 + σ12
terminal 2 can estimate W12 (1) with arbitrarily low probability of error. Note that
this condition is given by equation (2.4) of Theorem 2.1. Based on equation (2.5)
we can make similar arguments for perfect recovery of W21 (1) at T1 . Moving se-
quentially from block j − 1 to block j, j = 2, . . . , n we can ensure that at the
beginning of block j, both partners know (W12 (j − 1), W21 (j − 1)).
We now illustrate how equations (2.6)-(2.9) lead to reliable transmission of
W10 , W12 , W20 and W21 to the destination. The decoding starts from the last
block [25, 27] in which no new information is transmitted. Therefore we can set
(W10 (B), W12 (B), W20 (B), W21 (B)) = (0, 0, 0, 0).
Although this reduces the overall information rate by the factor (B − 1)/B, the
rate loss is negligible for large B. In this block the destination wishes to decode
W12 (B − 1) and W21 (B − 1). Since W10 (B), W12 (B), W20 (B), W21 (B) are known,
the condition
  √ 
|K10 |2 P1 + |K20 |2 P2 + 2|K10 ||K20 | PU 1 PU 2
(2.13) R12 + R21 < E C
σ02
√
is sufficient for reliable reproduction. The factor PU 1 PU 2 results from the coherent
addition of the cooperative signals U1 and U2 .
6 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

Moving into block B−1, the destination now has to decode (W10 (B−1), W20 (B−
1), W12 (B − 2), W21 (B − 2)). Following multiuser achievability results in [5] and
using [6, 1] to replace all the bounds on the rates by their expected values where
expectation is over the fading amplitudes, sufficient conditions on R10 , R20 , R12
and R21 for asymptotically error free transmission are given by equations (2.6)-(2.9)
and (2.13).
Dependency of all the signal components (namely X10 , X12 , U1 , X20 , X21
and U2 ) on the cooperation information (W12 (B − 2), W21 (B − 2)) leads to equa-
tions (2.9) and (2.13). Since (2.13) is dominated by (2.9) it will be omitted in the
final formulation. The destination then proceeds backwards in the same manner
until all the blocks are decoded.
By considering different power assignments P10 , P12 , PU 1 (and respective pow-
ers for T2 ) satisfying the total power constraint and time-sharing among different
strategies, we obtain the achievable region stated in Theorem 2.1. 

In order to illustrate potential benefits of a cooperative system, we draw the

achievable rate region for the proposed cooperative strategy of Theorem 2.1, to-
gether with the capacity region of the non-cooperative system in Figure 2. The
non-cooperative case corresponds to the usual Gaussian fading multiple access chan-
nel. We also include the “ideal” cooperative scenario in which the inter-user channel
is perfect. This represents the capacity of a two-antenna system with total power
P1 + P2 and channel phase information at the transmitter. We assume both termi-
nals have the same power constraint and the quality of the channel between each
terminal to the destination (represented as the mean of the fading levels K10 and
K20 ) is the same. We illustrate the achievable rate region of Theorem 2.1 for var-
ious qualities of the inter-user channel, with higher mean of K12 corresponding to
a better channel. We observe that even when the inter-user channel has similar
or worse quality than the user-destination channel, cooperation results in a larger
rate region. As the quality of the inter-user channel improves, the achievable rate
region greatly increases and gets closer to the ideal multi-antenna system.
Performance of the suggested cooperative system for an asymmetric scenario
is shown in Figure 3. The fading for T1 has higher mean than T2 . This, for ex-
ample could occur if T1 is closer to the destination. We observe that cooperation
continues to increase the set of achievable rates. Even though the user with se-
vere fading (lower fading mean) benefits more from cooperation, the equal rate
(R1 = R2 ) and the maximum rate sum point (R1 + R2 ) is increased considerably
with cooperation. This suggests that depending on the system requirements (such
as maximizing fairness or the total throughput) even the good user can benefit
from cooperation. Section 3 will provide further examples on the symmetric and
asymmetric cooperative systems.
We note that relay channel corresponds to R1 = 0 or R2 = 0. Hence in
Figures 2 and 3, the points at which any rate curve intersects the x or the y-axis
give achievable rates for the corresponding relay channel. Since the cooperative
curve is above the line joining R1 = 0 and R2 = 0 points, we argue that cooperation
performs better than time sharing between the two relays.

2.2. Probability of Outage. While the ergodic capacity region, or the set of
achievable rates, tell us about the long term average throughputs, outage probabil-
ity [17] shows us the robustness of the system to the variations in the channel. In
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 7

σ 0=1.0, σ1 =1.0, σ 2=1.0, P1=2.0,P2=2.0, E[K10]=0.63,E[K20]=0.63

2

Ideal
1.8
Cooperation (E[K12]=0.95)

1.6 Cooperation (E[K ]=0.71)

12
Cooperation (E[K12]=0.63)
1.4 Cooperation (E[K12]=0.55)
No cooperation
1.2
R1

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
R2

Figure 2. Achievable rate region for two-user cooperation. Both

users have similar average quality links towards the destination.

σ 0=1.0, σ1 =1.0, σ 2 =1.0, P1=2.0, P2=2.0, E[K10]=0.95, E[K20]=0.30, E[K12]=0.71

2

No cooperation
1.8 Ideal
Cooperation
1.6

1.4

1.2
R1

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2
R2

Figure 3. Achievable rate region for two-user cooperation. Users

have different average quality links towards the destination.

order to calculate the outage probability of the cooperative system, we assume that
the fading is slow and remains constant for the duration of B blocks. In that case,
the achievable rate region depends on the current values of the fading levels Kij
and is random. Assuming the transmit signal structure and the decoding scheme
8 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

in the proof of Theorem 2.1, equations (2.4)-(2.9) without the expectations lead
to an achievable rate region. To illustrate the improvement in outage probability
with cooperation, we consider a symmetric system as in Figure 2 and focus on the
largest equal rate operating point R1 = R2 = Rmax that can be sustained by co-
operation. Note that Rmax is random and depends on the fading levels of all the
links involved. The outage probability Pout = P (Rmax < r) tells us the probability
of a cooperative system being able to sustain an equal operating rate of r for both
users.
In Figure 4 we show the outage probability of the cooperative scheme as a
function of the operating rate r. For comparison, we also plot the equal rate outage
probabilities of a non-cooperative (multi-access) system and an ideal system where
the inter-user channel is error free. We observe that the outage probability for the
cooperation scheme is smaller than that of no cooperation. This is true despite
the fact that the increase in achievable rate due to cooperation is moderate for the
scenario depicted in Figure 4, as can be seen from Figure 2 (E[K12 ] = 0.63). Hence
even in cases when it does not significantly increase achievable rates, cooperative
communication is still able to increase robustness against channel variations. This
is due to increased spatial diversity of the system; with cooperation, partners are
able to utilize each other’s links towards the destination in case their own links
fail. To illustrate this further, Figure 5 shows the equal rate outage probability as
a function of the user signal to noise ratio (SNR) for a fixed rate r = 0.18. We
observe that the cooperation curve falls steeper than no cooperation and is parallel
to the ideal case. Since the slope of this curve for high SNR illustrates the level of
diversity, we can conclude that cooperation provides diversity equivalent to that of
a two-antenna array. Comparison with a worse inter-user channel (E[K12 ] = 0.45)
shows that the diversity gains are still present. However now the coding gain is
less, that is the outage curve exhibits a shift to the right. We of course expect the
performance to depend on the inter-user channel quality. This will be illustrated
further in Section 3.

3. Coding for Cooperative Systems

In this section we illustrate how cooperation continues to provide substantial
performance gains over a non-cooperating wireless system when we incorporate
some practical constraints. We will review some recent literature and describe
some of our ongoing work on channel coding for cooperation.
In order to model a more practical system, we have to change some of the
assumptions of Section 2. In Section 2 we had allowed both nodes to listen to each
other’s transmissions and transmit their own information at the same time. Even
though this is standard in information theory literature, in practice a wireless device
cannot perform perfect echo-cancelation, hence it cannot simultaneously transmit
and receive. To incorporate this constraint, we assume that the terminals transmit
and receive at different times. Also, in order to have a simple receiver which does not
employ multiuser decoding, we assume the terminals have an orthogonal multiple
accessing scheme. As an example we consider time division among nodes, that is
when there is no cooperation, each terminal has a separate time slot consisting of N
uses of the channel as in Figure 6(a). When they cooperate, as shown in Figure 6(b),
each terminal divides its time slot into two equal parts. In the first N/2 channel
uses, the terminal that owns the time slot transmits a signal. This signal is received
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 9

σ0=1.0,σ1=1.0,σ2=1.0,P1=2.0,P2=2.0,E[K10]=0.63,E[K20]=0.63,E[K12]=0.63
0
10

−1
10
Pr(R1 = R2 < r)

−2
10

−3
10

No cooperation
Cooperation
Ideal
−4
10
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
r

Figure 4. Probability of outage versus common rate r for two-

user cooperative system. Both users have similar average quality
links towards the destination.
σ0=1.0,σ1=1.0,σ2=1.0,E[K10]=0.63,E[K20]=0.63
0
10

No cooperation
Cooperation (E[K12]=0.45)
Cooperation (E[K12]=0.63)
Ideal

−1
10
Pr(R1 = R2 < r)

−2
10

−4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
SNR (dB)

Figure 5. Probability of outage versus signal to noise ratio for

two-user cooperative system. Both users have similar average qual-
ity links towards the destination. The common operating rate is
r = 0.18.
10 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

T1 T2
N channel uses N channel uses
(a)

T1 T2 for T1 T2 T1 for T2

N/2 N/2 N/2 N/2

(b)

Figure 6. Cooperation through time division. (a) Non-

cooperative orthogonal transmissions, (b) Cooperative scheme.

by both the partner and the destination. The second N/2 channel uses are reserved
for cooperation. We will describe a number of different cooperative strategies the
partner can utilize below.
Another assumption we relax from Section 2 is the channel phase knowledge at
the transmitters. The accurate knowledge of the phase may be hard to obtain in
practice, so we assume that the transmitters do not have any knowledge about the
fading amplitudes except for their statistics. As before, we assume that receivers
have perfect channel state information. We will observe that even with the above
set of assumptions cooperation continues to provide substantial performance gains.
The above cooperation scheme through time division was first suggested in [13,
14] which also provided a number strategies for cooperation. All the links were
assumed to be slowly fading, hence the proper information theoretic measure is
the outage probability. The emphasis was on the diversity, the large signal–to–
noise ratio (SNR) exponent of 1/SNR in the outage probability, of the suggested
cooperative strategies.
Amplify-and-forward and adaptive decode-and-forward are two cooperative
strategies investigated in [13, 14] that result in full (in this case two level) di-
versity. In the amplify-and-forward scheme, the partner simply scales its received
signal to satisfy its own power constraint and re-transmits to cooperate. The desti-
nation combines the first N/2 symbols coming from the original terminal with the
N/2 forwarded symbols from the partner. For the adaptive decode-and-forward
strategy, the partner attempts to decode the original information based on the sig-
nal it receives. As long as the inter-user channel has a received SNR high enough to
support the desired rate, there is no outage and Shannon-type perfect decoding is
possible. In that case, the partner re-encodes the information and transmits in the
remaining N/2 symbols where N is large. Otherwise, the original terminal simply
repeats the same codeword in the second half of its time slot. Note that both of
the protocols described involve some kind of repetition at the partner. However,
we know from channel coding techniques that there are more effective ways of de-
signing codes. Coding gain as well as diversity is important in the performance of
a channel code.
For cooperative channel coding, we will work with finite block lengths N and
focus on designing and analyzing codes suitable for cooperation. We follow the
time division scheme in Figure 6. We assume slow or quasi-static fading, that is
each link has a constant fading level for N symbols. Our protocol is similar to
the adaptive-decode-and forward of [13, 14] and that of [11]. We make use of
the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) commonly used for error detection in wireless
communication systems. Excluding the CRC, in a non-cooperative system each
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 11

Figure 7. An example of the bit mapping for cooperation for a

rate 1/4 convolutional code

terminal sends N coded bits per frame. In order to cooperate, T1 multiplexes these
N bits properly and only sends half of its coded bits. If the original channel code
had rate R, this corresponds to an effective coding rate of 2R. These bits are
received by both the destination and the partner. The partner, T2 , decodes these
N/2 bits and detects whether there are any errors using the CRC. If the partner has
the correct information, it re-encodes and sends the additional N/2 coded bits T1
did not transmit. This is illustrated in Figure 7 for a convolutional code of rate 1/4.
Otherwise, T1 is informed and it continues its transmission of the remaining N/2
coded bits. The destination waits until the end of the frame and combines both
N/2 observations to decode the information bit stream. Assuming the destination
estimates the current fading level every N/2 bits, there is no need to notify it as
to whether the partner received the information correctly or not. Then T1 and T2
change roles, so T2 acts as the source while T1 relays the information.
Note that in the suggested cooperative coding scheme, when the partner cannot
decode correctly, T1 suffers no loss from the non-cooperative case. This feature is
not present in the adaptive decode-and-forward protocol, as it forces the source to
repeat information rather than designing the “best” codebook for the whole N uses
of the channel.
From the perspective of the destination, when partner decodes correctly, the
first N/2 coded bits observe a fading amplitude of K10 , the second N/2 bits an
independent fading amplitude K20 . Hence the overall effect at the destination is
that of block fading, with two fading blocks. Based on this observation, we argue
that codes designed for block fading channels (such as those in [12]) are suitable for
cooperation. However, the cooperative systems impose additional constraints. In
order to cooperate often, that is for the partner to correctly decode, the first half of
the coded bits (or the punctured code) should form a good code in the quasi-static
inter-partner channel. Also, when the cooperation does not take place, all the coded
bits face the same fading level, so the code must be good for quasi-static channel as
well as the cooperative block fading channel. We will provide an example of such
a code in Section 3.2, more can be found in [22].
We note here that Hunter and Nosratinia [11] suggested the use of rate compat-
ible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes [10] for cooperation. However, RCPC
codes were not designed with diversity schemes or block fading channels in mind.
We think that the block fading framework allows us to work with a richer family of
codes and also enables us to provide a performance analysis illustrating the diver-
sity and coding gains of cooperative coding. Also, by starting from a good code in
the inter-user channel and adding additional parity bits to get a cooperative block
fading code, we can in fact improve the performance over a good code (say a code
12 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

designed for a block fading channel) punctured to be used in the inter-user channel.
Hence we think overlaying a code with additional parity bits is more suitable than
puncturing a code to be used in the inter-user channel. More details on this can be
found in [22]. The overlay ideas can also be used to take into account the cases in
which source and partner divide up the N bits unequally as suggested in [11].
In the next subsection, we analyze the diversity achieved by user cooperation
by studying upper bounds on the frame error rates of cooperative codes. We then
provide some simulations illustrating the suggested diversity and coding gains.
3.1. Performance Analysis of Cooperative Codes. In order to find bounds
on the performance of cooperative codes, we will focus on the frame error prob-
ability of the cooperative coding scheme described above. We concentrate on T1
and let PfC denote the overall frame error rate of a channel code when used for
cooperation. We also let Pfin denote the frame error probability of the portion of
the code used in the inter-user channel (corresponding to block length N/2), PfQS
denote the frame error probability over the quasi-static channel of T1 to destination
(corresponding to a block length of N ) and PfBF denote the frame error probability
over the cooperative block fading channel (first N/2 coded bits face T1 -destination
link, second N/2 bits face T2 -destination link). We can then write
PfC = (1 − Pfin )PfBF + Pfin PfQS .
We can upper bound PfC as
(3.1) PfC ≤ PfBF + Pfin PfQS .
We now investigate each of the terms in this upper bound. Let SNR1 denote
the average (averaged over the Rayleigh fading) received signal–to–noise ratio at
the destination corresponding to the transmission from T1 . The value for SNR1
depends on P1 , σ02 and E[K10 ]. Similarly, let SNR2 denote the average received
signal–to–noise ratio at the destination corresponding to the transmission from
T2 and SNRin denote the average received signal–to–noise ratio at partner (T2 )
corresponding to the transmission from T1 .
Note that in the cooperative block fading channel, the first block observes an
average signal–to–noise ratio of SNR1 while the second block has SNR2 . Even
though this is different than the usual block fading model in which all blocks have
the same average SNR, the pairwise error probability can be derived in a form sim-
ilar to [12]. Hence, utilizing the pairwise error probability expression for the block
Rayleigh fading channel and the union upper bound on the frame error probability,
we have
XX 1
(3.2) PfBF ≤
I 2 I 2
c e6=c Ξ2 (c, e) (SNR1 /4) d1 (SNR2 /4) d2
In order to define the terms in the above expression, we first define the code
Euclidian distances. Let us consider two codewords c = (c1 , . . . , cN ) and e =
PN/2
(e1 , . . . , eN ) each consisting of N bits. The distance d2i (c, e) = n=1 |cn+(i−1)N/2 −
en+(i−1)N/2 |2 , i = 1, 2, denotes the squared Euclidean distance among first and sec-
ond N/2 bits of the two codewords respectively. Note that for the cooperative block
fading channel, these two parts of the codewords face independent fading. The term
Ξ2 (c, e) denotes the product of the non–zero squared Euclidean distances d21 (c, e)
and d22 (c, e) and I denotes the indicator function.
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 13

For the quasi-static frame error probability PfQS of the T1 -destination channel,
the relevant distance term is Ψ2 (c, e) = d21 (c, e)+d22 (c, e) and it denotes the squared
Euclidean distance between the two entire codewords c and e. This gives us the
upper bound
XX 1
(3.3) PfQS ≤ 2 (c, e)SNR /4
c e6=c Ψ 1

The inter-user channel is also quasi-static, but it only utilizes the first N/2
coded bits. Hence,
XX 1
(3.4) Pfin ≤ 2 (c, e)SNR /4
c e6=c Φ in

where Φ2 (c, e) = d21 (c, e).

Using equations (3.2)-(3.4) in the upper bound of (3.1), we can bound the
cooperative coding frame error probability as
 
XX 1
(3.5) PfC ≤  
I 2 I 2
c e6=c Ξ2 (c, e) (SNR1 /4) d1 (SNR2 /4) d2
  
XX 1 XX 1
+  2

2
·
c e6=c Φ (c, e)SNRin /4 c e6=c Ψ (c, e)SNR1 /4
We envision cooperative systems to act as virtual antenna arrays and provide us
with additional spatial diversity. However, this depends crucially on the quality of
the inter-user channel. We now investigate two extreme scenarios for the inter-user
channel quality to study the potential gains of cooperation.
Case I: Good Inter–User Channel. First, we consider the performance when
the inter–user channel is very good. If the inter–user channel has very high average
signal–to–noise ratio, SNRin , then Pfin will be very small and the equation (3.1) is
dominated by PfBF . Therefore we have PfC ≈ PfBF and full second order diversity
is obtained. This is of course, expected. When the inter-user channel is almost
perfect, cooperative communication (using time division) corresponds to a regular
block fading channel.
Case II: Poor Inter–User Channel. In this case, we assume that the inter–user
channel has poor quality, that is Pfin is high. We note that for high signal–to–noise
ratios, block fading error probability PfBF will be lower than that of PfQS as it
provides two level diversity. Hence the upper bound on PfC is dominated by the
term Pfin PfQS . Therefore,
  
XX 1 1 X X 1 1
(3.6) PfC ≤  2 (c, e)

2 (c, e)
·
c e6=c SNR in /4 Φ c e6=c SNR 1 /4 Ψ

As the inter–user channel quality is low, we can assume that for the range of
transmit powers of interest, the received inter–user channel average signal–to–noise
ratio SNRin is at most equal to some value Cin . Then the tightest upper bound for
PfC is obtained for SNRin ≈ Cin . For high signal–to–noise ratios in T1 -destination
14 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

channel, this results in the approximation PfC ,

 
1 1 1
(3.7) PfC ≈
Cin SNR1 /4 minc,e {Φ2 (c, e)Ψ2 (c, e)}

Hence the minimum product distance minc,e Φ2 (c, e)Ψ2 (c, e) dominates the per-
formance at large values of the signal–to–noise ratio SNR1 ..
We observe that when the inter-user channel quality is very poor, the diversity
of the cooperative system is one and is limited by the diversity of the quasi-static
T1 -destination link. However, despite the limited diversity, there is still some coding
gain with respect to the non–cooperative transmission, as indicated by the squared
Euclidean distance product in equation (3.7). In the next section we illustrate via
simulations that this coding gain enables the cooperative scheme to outperform
non-cooperative communication even when the inter-user link is very noisy and
severely faded. For more moderate inter-user channel qualities, the performance of
cooperative coding substantially improves, and provides diversity as well as coding
gains.

3.2. Simulation Results. In this section we present the performance of the

proposed cooperative coding scheme via simulations to illustrate the potential ben-
efits. As discussed above, we assume a Rayleigh slow fading channel. Hence, we
use the quasi–static model, where the fading coefficients remain the same for the
duration of the entire frame for each user. Note, however that the users observe
independently faded channels. As an illustrative example, we use a constraint
length K = 4 convolutional code with generator polynomials (13,15,15,17) in oc-
tal notation and BPSK modulation [12]. This is an appealing solution due to the
widespread use of convolutional codes and the simple maximum likelihood decoding
algorithm [16]. The extensions to higher order modulations are also possible [12].
The way in which the transmission of bits is organized in order to form a
cooperative code is illustrated in Figure 7 for the rate 1/4 convolutional code. As
discussed, we would like to have the best convolutional code operating in the quasi–
static inter–user channel and user–destination channel. The rate 1/2, (15,17) code
provides the best performance in the quasi-static inter–user channel [16]. When
partner fails to decode and the original terminal continues with transmission, the
rate 1/4, (13,15,15,17) code provides the best performance in the quasi–static user–
destination channel [16]. When cooperation indeed takes place, the same rate 1/4
code, also provides full diversity and excellent coding gain over the cooperative block
fading channel [12]. Hence, with proper multiplexing of the coded bits, T1 first
transmits the bits corresponding to the (15,17) generator polynomials. Terminal 2
receives this transmission, decodes the information bits, and then re–encodes them
using the (13,15) generator polynomials. Note that in the case when T2 cannot
successfully decode the transmission from T1 , T1 transmits the rest of the coded
bits, corresponding to the (13,15) generator polynomials, by itself.
Similar to the situations analyzed in Figures 2 and 3, we consider both a sym-
metric scenario, in which terminals have similar quality links towards the destina-
tion, and an asymmetric scenario. We will also investigate the effect of inter-user
channel quality on the performance of the suggested cooperative scheme thereby
confirming the intuitions gained in Section 3.1.
In the symmetric scenario, both terminals have channels of similar quality,
as represented by equal average signal–to–noise ratios SNR1 and SNR2 , to the
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 15

destination. We demonstrate the performance of the (13,15,15,17) code in terms

of the frame error rate (FER) versus this common signal-to-noise ratio. Similar
results could also be obtained in terms of the bit error rate. We compare the frame
error rates of single user scheme (non-cooperative), cooperative with perfect inter-
user channel (“ideal”), and cooperative with various inter-user quality channels
(represented by inter-user FER of 0.01, 0.1 and 0.5). Our results are summarized
in Figure 8(a).
We observe that the suggested cooperative coding scheme with perfect inter–
user channel provides a performance improvement of about 4 dB at FER of 10−1
and about 10 dB at FER of 10−2 with respect to the non–cooperative, single user
transmission. As the inter-user channel quality degrades, or the inter-user FER
increases, the performance gracefully degrades from the perfect inter-user channel
case, and approaches to that of single–user transmission. For low inter-user FER
(0.01), the performance is very close to the perfect inter-user channel. Also, slope
of the FER curves for high SNR suggest that cooperation for low inter-user frame
error rates can indeed achieve full second order diversity as suggested by Section 3.1.
When the inter-user link has poor quality (FER=0.5) the diversity is limited to one.
Nevertheless, as predicted in Section 3.1, there is still some coding gain with respect
to the non–cooperative transmission, which results in performance improvements.
We would like to note that the FER trends of cooperative coding, as a function of
the inter-partner link quality, are similar to those of the achievable rate region and
outage probability studied in Section 2.
We next focus on the asymmetric scenario, which happens when, say, SNR1
is much larger than SNR2 . We consider this case by fixing one of the terminal’s
channel to the destination at a relatively high average signal to noise ratio. We
then vary the quality of the other terminal’s channel to the destination and observe
the performance of both cooperating users.
For the rate 1/4, (13,15,15,17) convolutional code, we fix SNR1 at 15 dB, which
results in a frame error rate of about 10−2 in the non–cooperative case. The inter–
user channel frame error rate is 0.5 which corresponds to a poor inter-user channel.
We vary the average signal–to–noise ratio of T2 and plot the cooperative and non-
cooperative FER’s of both terminals as a function of SNR2 in Figure 8(b). We
observe that with cooperation, T1 achieves the frame error rate of 10−2 when the
signal–to–noise ratio of T2 is only about −4 dB. At higher signal–to–noise ratios
cooperative performance for T1 is better than in the non–cooperative case. Terminal
2 also improves its performance by about 3 dB with respect to the non–cooperative
case for all the signal–to–noise ratios investigated. Hence cooperation benefits both
users even in an asymmetric case and poor inter-user channel.
We would like to compare this asymmetric situation with that of Figure 3. In
Figure 3 we had observed that even though the maximum rate of the good user
does not improve by much, the set of achievable rates increase considerably for an
asymmetric cooperative scenario. For the coding scheme discussed above, the gains
are even more dramatic, even when the inter-user has a high FER of 0.5 the good
also user benefits from cooperation.

4. Conclusions
In a cooperative communication system two or more active users in a network
share their information and jointly transmit their messages, either at the different
16 ELZA ERKIP, ANDREW SENDONARIS, ANDREJ STEFANOV, AND BEHNAAM AAZHANG

0
10
Single user performance
Perfect inter−user channel
Inter−user channel FER = 0.01
Inter−user channel FER = 0.1
Inter−user channel FER = 0.5

−1
10

FER

−2
10

−3
10

−4
10
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
Average received SNR (dB)

(a)

0
10
User 1, no cooperation
User 1, inter−user channel FER = 0.5
User 2, no cooperation
User 2, inter−user channel FER = 0.5

−1
10
FER

−2
10

−3
10
−8 −6 −4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Average received SNR2 (dB)

(b)

Figure 8. Two user coded cooperation for different inter-

user channel qualities: (a) symmetric, (b) asymmetric users.
(13,15,15,17) convolutional codes, quasi-static fading.

times or simultaneously, to obtain greater reliability and efficiency than they could
obtain individually. In this paper we consider a simple two-user cooperative system
to illustrate the benefits. We provide both an information theoretic and a coding
perspective to cooperation. Our achievable rate region and coding protocol illus-
trate few of the many possible schemes of collaboration among wireless terminals,
yet the benefits of cooperation are clear. Through cooperation both terminals are
 COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SYSTEMS 17

able to simultaneously increase their throughputs and reliabilities even when they
are connected via low quality links, or when one terminal has a much better link
then the other. Cooperation enables the terminals to make use of each other’s
antennas, an extra spatial dimension which is typically not utilized.
Throughout this paper we assumed the partners are fixed and we focused on
possible ways of cooperating. In order to successfully use the cooperative principles
in a wireless network, one has to be able to choose a good partner. Our ongoing
work investigates how partner choice should be made and what the geometry of
cooperation is. We are also investigating the added diversity benefits as the number
of partners increase, and how one can design and analyze cooperative space-time
codes when terminals have multiple antennas.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Zinan Lin for help in generating Figure 8.

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Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Polytechnic University, Five

Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201
E-mail address: [email protected]

Qualcomm Inc., Campbell, CA

E-mail address: [email protected]

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Polytechnic University, Five

Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201
E-mail address: [email protected]

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston,

TX 77005
E-mail address: [email protected]