A novel relay-assisted protocol for cooperative multiple access networks

A novel cooperative transmission protocol is proposed for multiple access scenarios, where multiple users communicate with a common destination with the assistant of multiple half-duplex relays. The proposed alternative relaying decode-and-forward (ARDF) protocol can achieve the full diversity gain by applying superposition coding at each transmitter, which also utilizes the linear zero-forcing detection at each relay to combat a serious inter-relay interference. Different to the previous uplink protocols, the proposed protocol can exploit the cooperation involving both the relays and sources, which guarantees the proposed scheme to approach the optimal multiple-input singleoutput upper bound even with general inter-relay interference. Analytical and numerical results have been provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed protocol.