Communication has become more dynamic these days rather than that which can be made possible only with wireless systems since wired will require more complex devices and cabling. However, these wireless technologies have low reliability. Thus cooperative communication is discussed in this paper which is a virtual MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) system to provide high reliability and throughput. This technique increases the reliability of the communication with less number of devices. Here, each antenna has one or more partners called relay to assist in transmitting the signal. The performance comparison of two cooperative protocols i.e. Amplify and Forward (AF) and Decode and Forward (DF) is analyzed using Matlab. It is seen that the DF relaying proves to be more advantageous than the AF relaying in terms of both throughput and BER. © Research India Publications.