Asynchronous cooperative relaying for vehicle-to-vehicle communications

Cooperative diversity exploits the broadcast nature of wireless channels and uses relays to improve link reliability. Most of the cooperative communication protocols are assumed to be synchronous in nature, which is not always possible in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication due to fast moving nature of the nodes. Also the relay nodes are assumed to be half duplex which in turn reduces the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous cooperative communication protocol exploiting polarization diversity, which does not require synchronization at the relay node. Dual polarized antennas are employed at the relay node to achieve full duplex amplify-and-forward (ANF) communication. Hence the transmission duration is reduced which results into an increased throughput rate. Capacity analysis of the proposed scheme ascertains the high data rate as compared to conventional ANF. Bit error rate (BER) simulation also shows that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms both the non-cooperative single-input single-output and the conventional ANF schemes. Considering channel path loss, the proposed scheme consumes less total transmission energy as compared to the conventional ANF and non-cooperative scheme. Thus the proposed scheme is suitable for high rate and energy efficient relay-enabled communication. © 2013 IEEE.