Maximum Spectral Efficiency of Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Transmission with Multiple Relays

In this paper, we propose a new amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative transmission scheme with adaptive modulation to maximize overall system spectral efficiency. We quantify the average spectral efficiency performance of the proposed scheme through statistical analysis based on an upper bound of the combiner output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and obtain the closed-form solutions for some practical scenarios of interest.