Reed-Solomon coding for cooperative wireless communication

During the last few years, several authors have studied the performance of many different types of channel codes for cooperative communication systems. Some of these codes include Low Density Parity Check (LDPC), Turbo and convolutional codes. Published results show that these codes effectively improve both the data rate and system performance in cooperative schemes such as the decode and forward (DF). Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are one of the most widely used channel codes in wireless communication systems today. These codes have also been adopted by several 3G standards including several digital video broadcasting (DVB) standards and also by worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) which is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard. However, published literature shows no specific study to investigate their performance for the cooperative communication environment. Using the component codes adopted in the IEEE 802.16 standard, this paper investigates the performance of the concatenated RS coding schemes for cooperative communication. This paper first analyses the standard RS-coded DF cooperative system. The results obtained for the standard RS-coded scheme show huge gains over the non-cooperative system. Some of the problems of the standard DF relay protocol is then discussed and an improved RS-coded DF cooperative scheme is proposed. The performance of the proposed scheme shows significant gains over the standard RS-coded DF system.