The success of MIMO technology has led to the concept of cooperative communications where multiple single-antenna nodes can share their antennas in order to create a distributed “virtual’ MIMO system. The basic idea of Multiple Input Multiple Output systems is to create spatial diversity transmitting signals from different locations. This elementary concept is the basis of cooperative communications. In this paper, a brief state of the art of cooperative communications is first presented. The concept is then applied to a wireless transmission scenario between an urban bus and a control centre with a relay for video surveillance applications. We consider either theoretical or realistic propagation channels: 1) Rayleigh channels on all three links, or 2) a Rice channel between the relay and the destination and a suburban channel for the other links. It will be shown that cooperative communications prove to be particularly interesting to extend the coverage range.
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