Abstract
In a coded cooperation scheme, the relay must decode and re-encode data. This process needs to be completed rapidly. Therefore, a simple channel coding/decoding scheme that requires low computational loads is needed. Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are simple, forward error-correction codes with low decoding computational loads. This paper introduces a three-user RS coded cooperation scheme that aims to have simple encoding/decoding complexity as well as to increase diversity order. It also presents the mathematical derivations of outage probability and investigates the outage performance of the three-user RS coded cooperation scheme. The derived outage probability expressions prove that the three-user RS coded cooperation scheme can achieve full diversity. Numerical bit error rate comparisons show that the three-user RS coded cooperation scheme performs better than a two-user scheme under various inter-user and uplink channel conditions. Outage probability performance improves at approximately 5 dB for regions with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and 10 dB for regions with high SNR under a slow-fading channel. The paper also presents the complete calculated numerical tables for outage probability terms (integral terms) that do not have closed-form solutions.