The commodity wireless card (e.g., 802.11 NIC) is one of the examples of these platforms [10]. However, the hardware of cooperative communication has extra requirements to implement physical layer functions, which cannot be resolved by these commodity wireless cards. Aside from these wireless cards, various testbeds are introduced using digital signal processor (DSP) kits or field programmable gate array (FPGA) boards [11]. While using these platforms, real time implementation and hardware issues can be resolved. The cost of implementation and hardware programming sets new era in research communities. But still, the above mentioned testbed is less efficient to solve the basic functions to implement various MAC layer protocols. The best solution against these problems is software defined radio (SDR) that is based on general purpose processor. They are more suitable for implementation of signal processing and MAC layer functions. They provide more efficient hardware programming environment. Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and GNU Radio, used as hardware and software platform [12; 13] are most popularly used SDR platforms in these days. However, these platforms are not widely used for cooperative communication testbed. So, this is one of the reasons that existing one can perform very limited number of radio functions [14]. They are only used for selective cooperative communications. In [15], an experimental testbed was established by using Ettus Research USRPs N210 with SBX daughterboard, VERT2450 antennas, and GNU Radio. The obtained results concluded that the strength of the signal at the receiver is significantly improved by employing the relay in the wireless network. In all of the previous research work, performance metrics of experimental analysis is based on BER, signal strength, and transmit power. In this paper, USRP and LabVIEW are used to implement the cooperative network testbed. LabVIEW software and NI USRP hardware provides affordability, functionality, and flexibility to deliver an ideal software-defined radio prototyping platform. In this experimental hardware, setup is interfaced with LabVIEW by Gigabit Ethernet port. It offers the signal processing capabilities for the modulation and demodulation of signals streaming to and from NI USRP hardware. Toolkits from LabVIEW software offer functional blocks for numerous analog and digital modulation methods and signal processing algorithms for real-world radio signals. The methodology that is used for implementation provides a platform for the evaluation of cooperative network performance on USRP and LabVIEW based testbed. This research paper provides the following contributions:  
* Design and implementation of a complete-functional testbed framework based on USRP and LabVIEW to support the cooperative communication, which includes a signal processing for the physical layer implementation of cooperative communication. * Different modulation schemes are used to verify the performance of the system. * Capacity analysis of cooperative network using LabVIEW and NI-USRP based test-bed. * Extensive experiments are performed with and without obstacles in the lab environment. * Determine the optimal position of the relay placement in the cooperative system. The result shows the significant capacity gain of CC over DC. The response of the system is very similar to the theoretical and simulation analysis. This paper is organized in the following sequence: in Section 2, related research works are reviewed. In Section 3, system model of the cooperative network using USRP is introduced. In Section 4, the experimental setup is discussed. In Section 5, the methodology used in the research work is explained. Section 6 provides the experimental results and discussions. In the last, Section 7, the conclusion and future work directions are presented.