Performance analysis of two-hop regenerative relay network with generalized selection combining at multi-antenna relay

Cooperative relaying was introduced to make use of the broadcast nature of the wireless channel, which provides spatial diversity to combat multi-path fading. Multiple antennas can be installed on infrastructure based fixed relays, which improve the system performance. Relay can process the signal received through multiple antennas with the help of maximum ratio combining (MRC) or selection combining (SC). MRC is an optimal combiner which fully exploits the spatial diversity at cost of higher complexity. SC is less complex, at the same time it cannot fully exploit the spatial diversity. Generalized selection combining (GSC) bridges the gap between these two schemes (MRC and SC), which adaptively combines the received signals from multiple antennas. In this paper, we investigate the performance of multi-antenna relay with GSC. The effect of relay placement in various path-loss condition is also studied.