Cooperative multiplexing in a half duplex relay network: Performance and constraints

Previous work on relay networks has concentrated primarily on the diversity benefits of such techniques. This paper explores the possibility of also obtaining multiplexing gain in a relay network, while retaining diversity gain. Specifically, consider a network in which a single source node is equipped with one antenna and a destination is equipped with two antennas. It is shown that, in certain scenarios, by adding a relay with two antennas and using a successive relaying protocol, the diversity multiplexing tradeoff performance of the network can be lower bounded by that of a 2 × 2 MIMO channel, when the decode-and-forward protocol is applied at the relay. A distributed D-BLAST architecture is developed, in which parallel channel coding is applied to achieve this tradeoff. A space-time coding strategy, which can bring a maximal multiplexing gain of more than one, is also derived for this scenario. As will be shown, while this space-time coding strategy exploits maximal diversity for a small multiplexing gain, the proposed successive relaying scheme offers a significant performance advantage for higher data rate transmission. In addition to the specific results shown here, these ideas open a new direction for exploiting the benefits of wireless relay networks.