A successive relaying protocol for a cooperative three-relay network

This paper proposes a relaying protocol for a network with three half-duplex relays. The protocol achieves full diversity of order three and full rate. This performance is achieved by means of cooperative successive-cancellation decoding followed by a sliding-window linear encoding scheme at the relays. The linear mapping at the relay encoder is designed to give an optimal constellation for the signals transmitted by the relays. The proposed scheme is shown to achieve full diversity when the relays are capable of decoding the original source symbols error free. The paper then proposes a selection-relaying approach capable of recovering full diversity even when the relay nodes decode erroneously. Simulation results confirm that the proposed relaying schemes indeed achieve the desired performance.