Outage Capacity of Bursty Amplify-and-Forward with Incremental Relaying

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the outage capacity of a bursty amplify-and-forward protocol with incremental relaying, showing its optimality under certain conditions and extending the analysis to networks with multiple relays.

Contribution

It derives the outage capacity of bursty AF with incremental relaying, revealing its independence from relay position and establishing its optimality in specific scenarios.

Findings

BAF's outage capacity ratio to the cut-set bound is relay-position independent.

BAF is outage optimal for certain target rates R.

Extended outage capacity analysis for networks with multiple relays.

Abstract

We derive the outage capacity of a bursty version of the amplify-and-forward (BAF) protocol for small signal-to-noise ratios when incremental relaying is used. We show that the ratio between the outage capacities of BAF and the cut-set bound is independent of the relay position and that BAF is outage optimal for certain conditions on the target rate R. This is in contrast to decode-and-forward with incremental relaying, where the relay location strongly determines the performance of the cooperative protocol. We further derive the outage capacity for a network consisting of an arbitrary number of relay nodes. In this case the relays transmit in subsequent partitions of the overall transmission block and the destination accumulates signal-to-noise ratio until it is able to decode.