An SNR-adaptive relaying algorithm for multi-antenna cooperative networks

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and cooperative communications have been attracted great attention for the improvements of communication capacity, power consumption, and transmission coverage. The conventional fixed relaying protocols, amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF), have their own advantages and disadvantages, i.e. AF performs better than DF for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region, while the reverse is true for high SNR region. Therefore, this paper proposes an SNR-adaptive forward (SAF) relaying scheme obtaining the advantages of both AF and DF. Furthermore, the proposed SAF does not need to switch between AF and DF when SNR changes. The main idea is to adaptively derive the soft information at the cooperative relay nodes based on the information of the received signal and the SNR. Besides, based on the theoretical analysis and the simulation results, it is affirmed that the proposed SAF achieves superior performance than both AF and DF for all SNRs. Moreover, the performance gain would be improved with the increasing number of parallel cooperative relay nodes.