A Novel Hybrid Relaying Scheme Using Multilevel Coding

In this paper, multilevel coding is tailored for cooperative communication, where the source deploys a layered encoding structure. Due to the BER difference for different coding levels, there is some possibility that the relay, despite of successful decoding in upper coding levels, might not be able to correctly decode in lower levels. We propose a hybrid relaying scheme to cope with this problem, where the relay deploys decode-and-forward in upper levels and compress-and-forward in lower levels. Simulation results demonstrate that this hybrid technique approaches a fine balance among the complexity, BER performance and transmission efficiency.