• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.12A
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• pp.1244-1250
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• 2007

User cooperation provides high reliability in wireless communication systems by employing relay nodes to transmit the same information. In this paper, a bit error rate (BER) study is presented for decode-and-forward (DF) relaying for user cooperation in independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. For an arbitrary number of relays, exact and closed-form expressions of the BER are proposed for M-ary PAM (Pulse Amplitude Modulation), QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and PSK (Phase Shift Keying), respectively. It is also shown that the analytic results are perfectly matched with the simulated ones.