A Distributed Quaternary Turbo Coded Cooperative Scheme

Cooperative communications achieve MIMO-like diversity gains by introducing a relay that creates an independent faded path between the source and the destination. Coded cooperation integrates cooperation with channel coding in order to increase the bit error rate (BER) performance of cooperative communications. Turbo codewords can be built efficiently at the destination using encoded portions of the information sent by the source and the relay. This paper presents a distributed turbo cooperative coding scheme that utilizes convolutional codes defined over the finite ring of integers Z4 that performs better than its equivalent binary counterparts.