Cooperative Multiuser Relay Communication with Superposition Coding

Cooperative relaying, while effective in mitigating fading effects, might reduce the overall network throughput since its overhead such as additional time slot and frequency band can be significant. In order to overcome this problem, this paper proposes a superposition coding based cooperative relay scheme to provide reliable transmission with little or no overhead. This scheme exploits the superimposed messages for users in the network to achieve the simultaneous transmission of two or more independent data streams. This scheme reduces the number of transmission phases to the same as that of conventional cooperative relay schemes. The symbol error performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed and simulated.