Availability of direct path in half-duplex-based cooperative relay networks

In this paper, we validate the availability of direct path in half-duplex-based cooperative relay networks from a practical point of view. Cooperative relaying is a low-complexity technique, which schedules orthogonal transmissions through the divided time slots. By doing so, transmission impairments due to multi-path fading and path loss are mitigated by obtaining a diversity gain. In conventional approaches, most researchers have focused on a role of relay and assumed that the received signal-to-noise ratio in source-to-destination link is doubled when source transmits the same signal twice during the two transmission phases. However, in practical wireless environments, a wireless channel is not static but varies with time. Thus, although the source retransmits the same signal during the second transmission phase instead of forwarding by a relay, the (time) diversity gain may be obtained. As a result, the performance of relaying-aided cooperative communication is not always better than that of the repeated transmission (RT), but the RT scheme may be a better option than a cooperative relaying scheme. To this end, we first show that the RT scheme is comparable to conventional cooperative relaying schemes. We then propose a selection decode-and-forward (DF) relaying scheme, which combines the DF relaying and RT schemes. The proposed selection DF relaying scheme has better outage performance than comparable relaying schemes in time-varying channels. Lastly, all the theoretical results are validated through numerical evaluations and Monte Carlo simulations.