Spectral Efficient Multihop Relaying Based on Alternate Transmission

A spectral efficient multihop relaying scheme is proposed based on scheduling the source transmission in alternate time slots. Each relay processes its received signal and forwards it in the subsequent time slot. An interference cancellation mechanism is developed to eliminate the interference term at each relay caused by the source alternate-based transmission. The frame error probability and the achievable rate of the proposed scheme are evaluated. It is shown that the individual bit-by-bit detection at the destination performs almost as well as the optimal joint detection, and achieves a data rate that approaches the Shannon channel capacity limit. In addition, the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the conventional orthogonal multihop transmission in terms of the achievable data rate, especially for larger numbers of hops, with slightly inferior frame error rate performance.