An effective protocol for rateless coding aided cooperative communications

In this paper, we study the bit error rate (BER) and the frame error rate (FER) performance for rateless coding aided cooperative communications using an effective protocol over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. During the collaborative phase, the proposed protocol adopts an adaptive demodulation (ADM) scheme considered channel state and the partial cooperation scheme depending on whether or not the partner decodes correctly. ADM schemes have been considered before by Illanko et al., but therein the effect of channel state is not considered, because the receiver always demodulates three (or two) bits per symbol for the case of 16QAM signaling during two phases in cooperative communications. Taking channel state into consideration, the BER performance of the modified ADM scheme is investigated. The proposed cooperative protocol is studied with different partial cooperation parameters, such as 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8. Furthermore, the validity of the partial cooperative scheme over flat Rayleigh fading channels is also substantiated by simulation results in terms of throughput and FER performance.