Inter-Relay Interference in Two-Path Digital Relaying Systems: Detrimental or Beneficial?

This Letter studies the two-path digital relaying systems, where two relay nodes alternately forward messages from the source to the destination. By applying the signal space diversity (SSD) technique, a novel adaptive scheme is proposed to deal with the inter-relay interference (IRI). Our work reveals that, with careful protocol design, the IRI becomes a beneficial resource that can be utilized rather than a detrimental factor that has to be suppressed. Simulation results demonstrate that, in high average SNR regions, the proposed method outperforms the existing alternatives in terms of symbol error probability.