Experimental Study On Cooperative Communication Based On SDR Platform

Cooperative communication is a highly promising technique for wireless net-works. It is based on the relay communication system, in the cooperative communica-tions, multiple users share antenna resources by forwarding each other’s informationand then form a distributed virtual MIMO system. So it greatly improve the perfor-mance of the whole mobile communication system by leveraging broadcast nature ofwireless medium.However, the existing works mostly investigate its performance theoretically orby simulation. Simulations often fail to faithfully capture many radio signal propaga-tion effects in real world. In this work, we build a cooperative testbed based on GNURadio and USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) in Linux operating systemand we conduct experimental study on the testbed. Decode-and-forward method isused in the experiments. The relay decoded the received signal and coded it in thesame way as the source，then forward it to the destination. The destination nodereceives two signals and combines them in maximum ratio. The experiment of coop-erative communication is carried out in the testbed and we evaluate the bit error per-formance of three signals: source signal, relay signal and the combined signal. Theresult shows that cooperative communication could achieve significant performanceenhancement in terms of link capacity and reliability.