Soft-decision-and-forward protocol for cooperative communication networks with multiple antennas

In this paper, a cooperative relaying protocol called soft-decision-and-forward (SDF) with multiple antennas in each node is introduced. SDF protocol exploits the soft decision source symbol values from the received signal at the relay node. For orthogonal transmission (OT), orthogonal codes including Alamouti code are used and for non-orthogonal transmission (NT), distributed space-time codes are designed by using a quasi-orthogonal space-time block code. The optimal maximum likelihood (ML) decoders for the proposed protocol with low de coding complexity are proposed. For OT, the ML decoders are derived as symbolwise decoders while for NT, the ML decoders are derived as pairwise decoders. It can be seen through simulations that SDF protocol outperforms AF protocol for both OT and NT.