Joint relay and antenna selection for full-duplex AF relay networks

In this paper, we propose a joint relay and antenna selection scheme in general full-duplex (FD) relay networks with one source, one destination and N FD amplify-and-forward (AF) relays. Each FD relay is equipped with two antennas, one for receiving and one for transmitting. We consider a joint antenna and relay selection scheme to optimize the end-to-end error performance. In the proposed scheme, each relay adaptively selects the transmit antenna and receive antenna based on the instantaneous channel conditions, and the optimal single relay with the optimal Tx/Rx antenna configuration is selected to optimize the end-to-end performance of the system transmission. This is in contrast to the conventional pure FD relay selection, where the Tx and Rx FD antenna of each relay are fixed. The proposed scheme achieves an extra space diversity due to the antenna selection at the relay nodes, and considerably improves the system performance compared to the conventional FD relay selection. Furthermore, closed-form expressions for the outage probability and average symbol error rate (SER) are derived. The analytical results are verified by the computer simulations. Results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional full-duplex relay selection scheme with fixed relay Tx and Rx antennas.