Transmit Cooperation Versus Distributed Coordination in Interference Links

In this paper, we investigate whether using a simple form of power allocation and relaying at the transmitters has the same order of performance gain as transmit cooperation coupled with complex coding techniques. We consider two different interference channel scenarios: a cellular system with two neighboring cells and an ad-hoc network with two interfering communication links over a given area. For transmit cooperation, we propose simple and practical linear pre-coding schemes based on Zero-Forcing (ZF) algorithm. We also propose to exploit relaying with distributed power allocation schemes. We see that in the high interference regime, using transmit cooperation coupled with complex coding schemes outperforms pure power allocation and relaying schemes. On the other hand for the moderate to low interference regime, the performance of the simpler schemes become comparable to that of transmit cooperation.