Partner Assignment Algorithm for Cooperative Diversity in Mobile Communication Systems

Most work on cooperative diversity has assumed that the cooperating group (source and partners) and the associated average channel conditions between terminals (source, partners, and destination) are predetermined. In practical situations, however, it is important to develop the efficient algorithms for assigning the terminals with good inter-user channels for cooperating groups. In this paper, we propose the partner assignment algorithm for cooperative diversity in mobile communication systems. The proposed partner assignment algorithm is investigated by using the path loss model for mobile communication systems. Numerical results show that the proposed partner assignment algorithm provides the comparable probability of cooperative transmission to the partner assignment algorithm using exhaustive search. The probability of cooperative transmission increases with the number of users, which gives potential benefits of practical implementation to user cooperation in mobile communication systems. The proposed partner assignment algorithm also provides the tradeoff between probability of cooperative transmission, cooperative diversity gain, and the amount of average SNR information of inter-user channels.