Hamming coding for multi-relay cooperative quantize and forward networks

A cooperative communication system is an effective way to deal with the multipath fading in a wireless channel. However, the data sent from a source to the relay or the destination may experience some losses or corruptions during the transmission, causing error bits. Those errors can degrade the system's performance. In order to detect and correct the errors, it is important to apply a channel coding to the cooperative networks. In this paper, the Hamming Coding for multi-relay cooperative quantize and forward (QF) networks is proposed. The Hamming Codes are the simplest linear codes that can be implemented with low complexity in the proposed networks. The proposed system model is presented with the analytic expressions of the networks. Moreover, the system performance is simulated using the computer simulation in terms of bit error rate (BER). It is shown in the simulation results that the Hamming Code could significantly improve the network's performance when the number of relays is increased. The network's performance is also increased by using high quantization levels in the QF relays. Furthermore, it is found that the performance of the multi-relay QF networks with Hamming Code is better than those of the multi-relay amplify and forward (AF) networks with and without the Hamming Coding. It is concluded that the performance of multi-relay QF network is improved by the use of Hamming Code as well as the advantage of quantization levels.