Performance analysis of hybrid AF and DF protocol for relay networks

Relay communication network is a technique to obtain spatial diversity by using one or more relay terminals in order to improve the transmission performance. Amplifty-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) are two kinds of fixed relaying protocols and widely researched now. In this paper the performance of AF and DF in terms of the outage probability and the symbol error rate (SER) is analysed. We also introduce and analyse a protocol of hybrid AF and DF (HADF) which is a new relaying protocol based on AF and DF. HADF protocol can choose the right protocol (AF or DF) that should be used in the relay transmission. In this paper, we compare HADF with AF and DF respectively, and the simulation results show that the performance of HADF protocol has been greatly improved with respect to outage probability and SER.