Hybrid Forwarding in Cooperative Communications

A cooperative communication scheme was developed in which the relay node performs hybrid forwarding, where the relay node will not forward data for a transmission pair unless the corresponding direct transmission fails, and the relay node will not forward data for a transmission pair unless the quality of the channel between the corresponding source and the relay is good. A performance analysis of the outage probability and the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for the scheme shows that the forwarding mechanism efficiently reduces fading in wireless channels by achieving full diversity order of magnitude improvement. A considerable signal-to-noise ratio gain is provided by this scheme compared with existing cooperation schemes with fixed forwarding. This flexible forwarding mechanism enables the scheme to provide the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff performance.