A Simple Distributed Antenna Processing Scheme for Cooperative Diversity

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a simple distributed antenna processing scheme for relay channels, demonstrating that combining techniques like MRC and beamforming can fully exploit spatial diversity and outperform traditional space-time coding.

Contribution

It introduces a straightforward relay processing scheme using MRC and beamforming, showing its effectiveness in achieving full spatial diversity and power gains.

Findings

Distributed antenna combining techniques exploit full spatial diversity.

The proposed scheme offers significant power gains over space-time coding.

Full diversity is achievable regardless of relay and antenna count.

Abstract

In this letter the performance of multiple relay channels is analyzed for the situation in which multiple antennas are deployed only at the relays. The simple repetition-coded decodeand- forward protocol with two different antenna processing techniques at the relays is investigated. The antenna combining techniques are maximum ratio combining (MRC) for reception and transmit beamforming (TB) for transmission. It is shown that these distributed antenna combining techniques can exploit the full spatial diversity of the relay channels regardless of the number of relays and antennas at each relay, and offer significant power gain over distributed space-time coding techniques.