Abstract: By introducing quality of service(QoS) attributes into cooperative communications, a QoS-aware cooperative diversity protocol is proposed. According to different services, cooperative diversity is invoked only if the minimum data rate required to have a successful transmission cannot be achieved. Based on user-specific QoS requirements, partners are determined cautiously. Analytical and simulation results indicate that the QoS-aware cooperative diversity protocol can avoid the negative effect of error propagation in cooperation and greatly improve the system throughput.

Key words: cooperative diversity, quality of service, throughput, wireless local area network