Impact of Rayleigh and Rician Fading Environments to the Performance of Cooperative Device-to-Device

A cooperative device-to-device (D2D) communication is developed as one of the communication models for 4G technology, and one of critical technologies for the 5G technology in the future. The basic of cooperative D2D communication is to use mobile devices as relays that are placed between source and destination. The relay will receive a replica of the information signal from the source, and then through the relay protocol mechanism, the information is forwarded to the destination. In D2D communication, information will be affected by a fading environment that can reduce system performance. For this reason, this study analyzes the impact of Rayleigh and Rician fading to the performance of the cooperative D2D communication. This paper proposes four fading environmental scenarios in evaluating the performance of cooperative D2D communication. The research method is system modeling and computer simulation. The cooperative network model is a single-relay network using decode and forward (DF) cooperative protocols and convolutional codes as a channel coding technique. The simulation results show that the system performance in the Rician fading is better than the system in the Rayleigh fading. The combination of Rayleigh and Rician fading in a network has also been simulated, where the results show that the network with the dominant Rician fading has better performance than the dominant Rayleigh fading network. Then, system performance can be improved by using the convolutional code with a low code rate because it can correct information errors due to the influence of fading becomes higher than that of a high code rate.