Abstract: Cooperative communication has been recently proposed as a way to provide dramatic gains in fading wireless environments. Most literatures about cooperative communication assume each node arc equipped with only one interface or several homogeneous interfaces. To date,mobile terminals with heterogeneous interfaces become more popular,which motivate us to study cooperative communication in heterogeneous cellular networks. We introduced a VAA_DSTC scheme, which is suitable to heterogeneous cooperative communication system, and demonstrated that the data rate difference between heterogeneous interfaces can bring extra spatial multiplexing gain,in addition to diversity gain.Moreover,we characterized the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of VAA_DSTC scheme and compared it with other schemes.

Key words: Cooperative communication, Distributed spacctime coding, Virtual antennas arrays, Diversity-multiplexing tradeoff