Spectral efficiency of fundamental cooperative relaying in interference-limited environments

The spectral efficiency of cooperative relaying in interference-limited environments in which a given channel is spatially reused is investigated. Cooperative relaying is a promising technique that uses neighboring stations to forward the data toward the destination in order to achieve spatial diversity gain. It has been reported that by introducing cooperative relaying into communication between an isolated source-destination pair, the error rate or spectral efficiency is generally improved. However, it is not intuitively clear whether cooperative relaying can improve the performance in interference-limited environments because the simultaneous transmission of multiple stations increases the number of interference signals. Assuming the most fundamental cooperative relaying arrangement, which consists of only one relay station. numerical results reveal that cooperative relaying is not always superior to non-cooperative single-hop and two-hop transmissions in terms of spectral efficiency.