Performance analysis of cooperative communication systems using wireless open access research platform for indoor and outdoor environment

Effect of multipath fading can decrease the performance of wireless communication systems. The multiinput multi-output (MIMO) technique, which uses multiple antennas, often used to overcome multipath fading. This technique is one of the diversity techniques. Some wireless devices have limitation about the size, cost, and hardware complexity, so there cannot implement a multiple antenna. Then, new technique has been developed to overcome these limitations, there was called cooperative communication systems. Although the cooperative communication system has been widely studied, but it was not much researcher already implemented this system. Therefore, this study will be conducted a simulation and implementation of cooperative communication system on Wireless Open Access Research Platform (WARP) module using Demodulate and Forward relaying techniques with Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) and Selection Combining (SC). In this research will compare the performance of cooperative communication system with non-cooperative communication system, i.e. Single Input Single Ouput (SISO) and multi-hop to evaluate the BER performance as function of the transmit power and distance variation. At the first scheme of BER measurement, the distance between the source and the destination was fixed as 6 meters, relay was right in the middle, and the transmit power be varied from -39.67 dBm to -11.47 dBm. In the second scheme, the transmit power was be adjusted -39.67 dBm, the distance between the source and destination in a variation of 1 meter to 6 meters. The results of measurement showed that cooperative communication system with MRC better than SISO communication systems, multi-hop communication and cooperative communication system with SC for indoor or outdoor environment.