Dual antenna cooperative diversity techniques

This paper presents the application of two spatial transmission techniques which can be used in a cooperative diversity wireless network, where each mobile terminal has two antenna elements. Initially the current body of work in single antenna cooperative diversity is expanded to include the effect of cooperative diversity upon the capacity of a link. This is to serve as a baseline model for comparison with the dual antenna methods. This paper then introduces two techniques which can be used for cooperative diversity where mobile terminals are each equipped with two antenna elements. Using the same metrics as the single antenna case, a comparison is made between the results from simulations of each technique. It is shown that dual antenna elements offer considerable advantage over the single antenna element case, and that two antenna element space-time transmit diversity (STTD) based cooperative diversity is preferred at low SNRs.