Performance of DCSK cooperative communication systems over multipath fading channels

A differential chaos shift keying cooperative communication (DCSK-CC) system with two users is proposed in this paper, which has an orthogonal subchannel in broadcast phase and cooperative phase through orthogonal Walsh code sequences as its multiaccess scheme. The single relay cooperative network with decode-and-forward relay is investigated in the proposed system according to two cooperation protocols, namely, conventional cooperation and space-time cooperation. Unlike conventional CDMA cooperative communication (CDMA-CC) systems, quite surprisingly power control devices that consume more energy to mitigate near-far effects can be avoided in the proposed system, which is of great importance to energy-constrained networks such as wireless sensor networks. Simulation results demonstrate that, through a conventional cooperation mechanism, the proposed system has a prominent advantage of good bit-error-probability (BEP) performance over the CDMA-CC systems that have a single path correlation receiver, at the same data rate with a high SNR range over multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Meanwhile, it is found that conventional cooperation is a better cooperation strategy relative to space-time cooperation in the proposed system. In addition, a lower bound of BEP performance is derived and verified by simulations over independent three-ray Rayleigh fading channels. © 2010 IEEE.