Multi-relay Orthogonal and Non-orthogonal Amplify and Forward for Two-way Cooperative WLANs

Wireless local area network (WLAN) is a standard wireless communication technology for indoor environments due to its flexibility and mobility. This technology is expected to provide high-speed wireless multimedia services. However, this wireless communication technology has to face two major problems: interference and multipath fading. One of the diversity techniques has been recognized as an effective solution to overcome the problems, known as cooperative communication systems where sources send information to destinations through some other nodes (relays). In this system, the relay mechanism uses amplify and forward (AF) protocol as an essential role in forwarding information to the destination. This paper examines the performance of multi-relay orthogonal AF (MR-OAF) and non-orthogonal AF (MR-NAF) in two-way cooperative WLANs. Then, the proposed network model is simulated to obtain the performance in terms of outage probability and throughput. The simulation results show that MR-OAF performance is better than MR-NAF in two-way cooperative WLAN. Thus, the MR-OAF protocol is an appropriate method to two-way cooperative WLANs, especially for standard IEEE 802.11ac.