Analysis of incremental relaying protocol with RCPC in cooperative diversity systems

The incremental relaying protocol in this paper applies the idea of hybrid-ARQ with rate-compatible puncture convolutional code (RCPC) on the cooperative setting. It is shown that the incremental relaying protocol clearly achieves full diversity in the symmetric user case while still has significant performance gain over no-cooperation system in the asymmetric user case. Simulation results of bit-error rate (BER), throughput and percentage of cooperation of the protocol have been confirmed by analytical results which yield further insight to the operation of the protocol.