• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.257-265
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• 2011

In this paper, a cooperative relaying protocol called soft-decision-and-forward (SDF) with multiple antennas in each node is introduced. SDF protocol exploits the soft decision source symbol values from the received signal at the relay node. For orthogonal transmission (OT), orthogonal codes including Alamouti code are used and for non-orthogonal transmission (NT), distributed space-time codes are designed by using a quasi-orthogonal space-time block code. The optimal maximum likelihood (ML) decoders for the proposed protocol with low decoding complexity are proposed. For OT, the ML decoders are derived as symbolwise decoders while for NT, the ML decoders are derived as pairwise decoders. It can be seen through simulations that SDF protocol outperforms AF protocol for both OT and NT.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.35 no.1C
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• pp.1-7
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• 2010

In this paper, the performance of the soft-decision-and-forward (SDF) protocol in the cooperative communication network with one source, one relay, and one destination, where each node has two transmit and receive antennas, is analyzed in terms of the bit error rate (BER) obtained from the pairwise error probability (PEP). For the slow-varying Rayleigh fading channel, the optimal and suboptimal power allocation ratios are determined without feedback. The optimal power allocation can be obtained by minimizing the average PEP. For the tractability, an alternative strategy of maximizing the product SNR of direct and relay links, which we call the suboptimal power allocation, is considered. Through the numerical analysis, we show that the performance gap between the suboptimal and the optimal power allocation is negligible in the high SNR region.