PCA relay strategies for sensor networks and cooperative communications systems

Sensor networks are a way to combat the fading in cooperative communications systems due to spatial diversity characteristic and they are so popular in the new generation of wireless networks. In this research the PCA relay strategies on a two-hop protocol sensor network is proposed and the better BER performance than the conventional relay matrix is achieved. It is considered one antenna for all nodes of the network including relays in the same distance from source and destination. The PCA method is applied for relay strategies, based on the eigenvectors corresponding to the largest eigenvalues of channels at both sides of relays, constraining total power usage. The BER and MSE criterion of the proposed scheme are derived.