A novel cooperative transmission scheme based on superposition coding and partial relaying

This paper considered the single relay system and proposed a novel repetition coding decode-and-forward DF cooperative transmission scheme on the basis of superposition coding and partial relaying. In the proposed scheme, the link disparity due to the geometry of the relay network is emphasized, and only a fraction of the information is transmitted in relay mode with the rest being transmitted directly, which benefits from the utility of superposition coding SC in broadcast situation. The proposed scheme is analyzed in two cases, one assumes full channel state information at the source full CSIS, the other with only mean gain of each link known by the source partial CSIS. For both cases, the optimal design of system parameters is considered. We investigate the achievable rate and expected rate performance for these two cases, respectively. The proposed schemed is well compared with conventional repetition coding DF, parallel coding DF, as well as another promising superposition coding relaying. It is concluded that, by designing protocols that orients to certain network geometry, better trade-off between performance and complexity can be obtained. The analysis reveals that the gap between conventional repetition and parallel coding is largely mitigated by the proposed scheme, quite for the scenario that the relay locates relatively but not extremely closer to the source, at moderate SNR regime for both partial and full CSIS cases. The proposed scheme becomes more beneficial in severe path loss attenuation scenario. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.