A Survey on Cooperative

Communication in 4G-LTE Wireless

Networks: A Review of the Literature
Aklilu Alemayehu
Jimma Institute of Technology,
Department of Communication Engineering
August, 2019

1 Abstract
Due to the limited spectrum and power, only physical layer tech-
nologies such as MIMO and OFDM are not sufficient to deal with
the ever increasing data rate demand. As a result, increasing the
spectral efficiency of the wireless network through cooperative com-
munication where cooperation between source, relay and destination
is required. The cooperative relaying will enhance capacity, transmis-
sion reliability, spatial diversity gains and increased coverage. This
paper does a survey on the various cooperative relaying mechanisms
that can be used for LTE(4G) cooperative communication purposes.
The literature discusses various cooperative relaying approaches and
comparison is done which will help identify best technique possible.

2 Introduction
The 4G (LTE Advanced) technology came up with significant data rate im-
provement in both downlink and uplink transmission by incorporating several
physical layer enhancements such as carrier aggregation, HetNets and MIMO.
Among these MIMO technique aims to improve data rate and quality through
system diversity gain [1]. Although transmit and receive diversity is clearly
advantageous on a cellular base station, it may not be practical for other sce-
narios. Specifically, due to size, cost, or hardware limitations, a wireless agent
may not be able to support multiple transmit antennas. Examples include most
handsets (size) or the nodes in a wireless sensor network (size, power). This ar-
ticle discuses technique called cooperative communication which will enable 4G
networks to reap the benefit of MIMO system through sharing their resources
to provide multipath propagation that will increase diversity gain.

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 According to the literature recent development in wireless cooperative com-
munication system, power and bandwidth has led to the improvement of relays
technology. In relay networks source(S) and destination (D) terminals are inter-
connected using some intermediate nodes which are generally called as relaying
nodes. Due to shadowing line of site between S and D can be terminated and
signals might arrive the destination with parameters like scattering reflection or
any other effect which will reduce quality and performance.
Fading in wireless channel tremendously affects the performance of wire-
less communications. Thus it is imperative to mitigate the impact of wireless
impairment in order to improve the performance of wireless communication. Co-
operative communication has been shown as a promising approach to combat
wireless impairments by exploiting spatial diversity without the need of multi-
ple antennas at both transmitter and receiver [2]. According to the literature,
Co-operative communications have been employed over past few years to over-
come the drawbacks of implementing MIMO systems and the schemes are used
to attain the largest diversity order.
The authors outline that several researches indicate that challenges in wire-
less data transmission due to characteristics such as signal fading, bit error rate
(BER), Signal-to-Noise ratio(SNR), Channel State Information(CSI) and QoS,
required new developments for data transmission technique by the use of relays:
Amplify and Forward and Decode and Forward. The literature describes vari-
ous relay based Cooperative Communication techniques, existing methodologies
and finally compares surveyed approaches to indicate research result.
The generalized Alamouti transmit diversity model with multiple transmis-
sion and single reception, and STBC (Space Time block Code) codes are pro-
posed as a system model to provide gain and diversity.

3 Cooperative Communication
Researches have shown that cooperative communication can offer significant
performance enhancements in terms of increased capacity, improved transmis-
sion reliability, spatial diversity and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. Different
from the conventional relaying, where only one node is decoding and encoding
the message, and signals from other nodes are treated as interference, cooper-
ative communications requires the cooperation among nodes. When the source
transmits message any of the intermediate relays receive the message. Accord-
ing to the authors the optimum relay that has the highest gain of the channel
is selected based on part of Channel State Information (CSI) available at the
relay and source nodes. Relay is selected based on channel prediction. The relay
with the maximal predicted channel strength or the minimal predicted outage
probability is selected to forward data [2].
In the paper it is pointed out that if there are multiple relays, among the
set of available relays, only a single relay is activated. This technique is called
selective relaying. Hence, the resources available were used efficiently. Selection
of single-relay in cooperative relaying based on a maximum SNR is known as

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opportunistic relaying (OR). An alternate method to OR were used DSSC (dis-
tributed switch and stay combining). In DSSC, a relay is active till it receives
the signal with larger SNR than the present SNR value. CSI plays important
role in selecting best relay and it is deployed proactively or reactively. In proac-
tively selection, the best relay is selected before the messages transmitted to
destination from source. On the other hand, reactive relay selection involved
all the relays as part of the communication. Here all the relays have to listen
to the source message. Receiving all the messages by the relays, the optimum
relay has been chosen then it would be used for retransmit the source messages
to the destination. Normally, energy utilization of reactive mode is higher than
proactive mode.

4 Relay Based Cooperative Communication Tech-

niques
Comparing to other techniques, cooperative communication is superior to other
in its flexibility and hardware feasibility, according to the authors of the lit-
erature. The literature analyzes two signal processing technique: Decode and
Forward(DF) and Amplify and Forward(AF). In the literature there are three
types of relaying protocols discussed: half-duplex(HD) relaying protocols, two-
path(TP) relaying protocols and two-way(TW) relaying protocols.
According to Geng Ke a, Gao Qiang a, Fei Li b, Xiong Huagang, in decode
and forward technique the cooperation is divided in to three phases:
1. All relays will decode the received packet and check for error using CRC
bits, the relays that have decode the data successfully are the candidates
to forward it to the destination.
2. Some of the decodable relays (if no error) are selected to forward the data
based on CSI.
3. The selected relays forward the data to the destination. The destina-
tion combines the signals from the relays using Maximal Ratio Combiner
(MRC) and decodes it.
In the literature, under this technique in the indirect connection between source
and destination node, the relay receives message at tth time slot and transmits
at (t + 1)th time slot. From the literature:
At the relay, y[t] = h[t]x[t] + n[t]
At the destination, y[t + 1] = h[t + 1]x[t + 1] + n[t + 1]

With the amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme, the relay will amplify its re-
ceived signal in the first stage and then forward it to the destination in the
second stage [3]. From the literature:
At relay, y[t] = x[t]h[t] + n[t]

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 At destination, y[t + 1] = h[t + 1]g[t]h[t]x[t] + h[t + 1]g[t]n[t] + n[t + 1]

The above equation indicates that relays can serve only a single source in a
given time or frequency slot, and therefore the available resources are not shared
efficiently by the sources.

5 Existing Cooperative Relaying Methodologies

discussed in the literature:
1. DF Co-operative relaying scheme: decode the received signal at the relay,
re-encode it, and then retransmit it to the receiver. According to the
literature this technique is used for reduced BER and improved coverage.
2. DNF-TPSR Scheme (De Noise and Forward-Two Path Successive Relay-
ing): used to improve the spectral efficiency loss due to HD transmission.
It uses indirect transmission between source and destination.
3. STBC-NOMA (Space Time Block coding Non-Orthogonal Multiple Ac-
cess): The transmission reliability and system capacity may increase by
deploying multiple antennas at relaying nodes. This technique requires
some complex operation due to multiple antennas at the receiver.
4. DF-TWFD Scheme: To achieve more efficiency in spectral usage, two way
(TW) relay had used in full duplex mode.
5. HDAF-NOMA Scheme: is a technique with multiple relay to decode-
amplify-forward scheme. The HDAF-NOMA relaying protocol was used
to enhance the entire network performance.
6. Joint antenna and Relay Selection: single antenna multi relay cooperative
diversity scheme consist of more number of antennas at the source end (S)
and the destination end (D). The Proposed antenna strategy and relay
selection methods is same as path and antenna selection technique but it
is limited to single relay cooperative MIMO system. The selected source
antenna transmits to all available relays and selected antenna will receive
at the destination.
7. Selective Decode-and-Forward Relaying (SD-FR): SD-FR networks con-
sidered different modulation levels at transmitting nodes. It has shown
that, performance of the proposed method had been improved in terms
of average error probability and spectral efficiency when compared to the
conventional modulation methods by modulation level selection (Adap-
tive) and power allocation.
8. Threshold based Selective Weighted Least Square (TSWLS) method : For
combining a signal in LTE-A networks, TSWLS method is used also for
the purpose of improving the signal strength of received signal at the user
equipment and improve system capacity.

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 9. Resource Allocation: This technique considers the problem of power allo-
cation to improve the throughput.

6 Discussion and Conclusion

The very high data rates targeted by 4G(LTE-Advanced) requires a denser in-
frastructure to reduce transmitter to receiver distance thereby increasing the
data rate. In order to achieve this in addition to coordinated multipoint trans-
mission, relaying is another solution. The literature discusses various coopera-
tive relaying mechanisms with their respective signal processing techniques used
and compares their performance against direct communication.
The survey has addressed all the recent cooperative relaying techniques de-
veloped to overcome the issues with the old techniques such as spectral ineffi-
ciency due to one-way relaying. The literature focused on AF and DF signal
processing techniques in the relays but other researches include third technique
with compress and forward technique. Much emphasis is given to relays with
DF signal processing (layer 2 and layer 3) since it is best suited to deal with
interference and noise due to its error detection capability. Relaying techniques
equipped with concepts of NOMA, SD-FR, TSWLS are also discussed.
The signals are broadcast in free space in wireless communication, so signals
are normally accessible to anyone who has device capable of getting them which
will cause security concern. This literature can be expanded to include the
security issues related to each relaying technique.
Currently, several researches, such as adaptive modulation, best relay se-
lection or combination of the two, are being considered on improving spectral
efficiency loss of conventional cooperative relaying [4]. I believe bidirectional/full
duplex cooperative relaying with improved spectral and energy efficiency will be
a challenge in future research of cooperative communication, especially in 5G.

7 Literatures Cited
1. “LTE-Advanced, An Evolution Built for the Long-haul” Qualcomm In-
corporated, 5775 Morehouse Drive,San Diego, CA 92121 U.S.A., 2013
c

2. ”Relay selection in cooperative communication systems over continuous

time-varying fading channel”, Geng Ke a, Gao Qiang, Fei Li, Xiong Hua-
gang
3. ”Wireless Communications: Principles, Theory and Methodology”, First
Edition. Keith Q.T. Zhang.
c 2016 John Wiley ‘I&’ Sons, Ltd. Published
2016 by John Wiley ‘I&’ Sons, Ltd.
4. ”On the Spectral Efficiency of Selective, Decode-and-Forward Relaying”,
Hamza Umit Sokun and Halim Yanikomeroglu