Performance analysis of cooperative communication with heterogeneous relays

In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous relaying system which operates multiple amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relays together. In the proposed system, the heterogeneous relays transmit cooperatively and the receiver at destination exploits received signals of both AF and DF relays. We consider joint encoding (JE) and selective transmission (ST) as cooperative heterogeneous relay transmission schemes. We derive the optimal JE for heterogeneous relays. The extensive simulation results show that the performance of heterogeneous relaying system lies between homogeneous AF and DF relaying system, and follows the performance of homogeneous DF relaying as the number of relays increases.