Round-Robin Relaying with Diversity in Cooperative Communications

In this paper, a round-robin based relay protocol (R3P) is proposed to provide full cooperative diversity in a cooperative communication system. Distinct from traditional relay protocols which also yield full cooperative diversity, R3P is based on round-robin scheduling, thus avoids relay selection and requires no global channel statistic information (CSI) at the destination. R3P can therefore be realized with lower implementation complexity. Furthermore, in wireless network where there are more sources than relays, R3P requires much fewer time slots while maintaining reliability, and significantly improves the throughput of the network. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results verify the validity and superiority of R3P.