Hybrid cooperation scheme for the AF-MIMO relaying system

A hybrid relay selection scheme based on amplify-and-forward (AF) is proposed in the general cooperative communication network. In the proposed scheme, all the relays are divided into two groups, referred to as group P and group Q depending on whether they can perform decoding correctly or not. Both group P and group Q will select the relay which has the maximum signal-to-noise ratio at the destination. Simulation results show that the proposed relay selection scheme significantly outperforms the conventional AF selection scheme in terms of both bit error rate (BER) and channel capacity, and that these performance gains considerably grow as the transmission power of group P increases and antennas equipped on the nodes increases respectively.