Cooperative Relay Prototype Development and Performance Measurement

Abstract

To meet the demand for high data rate, the wireless cellular system technology has grown in a steady pace in recent years. However, due to multipath fading, shadowing effects and path loss, the wireless communication links are prone to errors. To improve the communication link, at the cell edge and shadowed environment, cooperative relaying scheme has been proposed. In cooperative relaying, an additional node is placed between the source and destination terminals, to provide redundant path for data transmission. However, existing literature on cooperative relaying only investigates the system performance through theoretical simulations. The real world performance remains unknown because of the lack of prototypes for field testing and measurement. This work focuses on the development of an amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative relaying prototype. The prototype is developed using the LabVIEW system development platform and the implementations are carried out on Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). The performance of the AF based cooperative relaying prototype is measured in terms of the bit error rate (BER) and compared with the direct communication link without relay. The measured results show that cooperative relay assisted communication achieves significant improvement in terms of signal reliability, coverage distance and power efficiency.