A Geometry-Inclusive Analysis for Single-Relay Systems

Abstract EN

Successful message relay, or the quality of the interuser channel, is critical to fully realize the cooperative benefits promised by the theory.

This in turn points out the importance of the geometry of cooperative system.

This paper investigates the impact of the relay's location on the system capacity and outage probability for both amplify-forward (AF) and decode-forward (DF) schemes.

Signal attenuation is modeled using power laws, and capacity is evaluated using the max-flow min-cut theory.

A capacity contour for DF, the more popular mode of the two, is provided to facilitate the derivation of engineering rules.

Finally, a selective single-relay system, which selects the best relay node among a host of candidates according to their locations, is analyzed.

The average system capacity and outage, averaged over all possible candidates' locations, are evaluated.

The result shows that the availability of a small candidate pool of 3 to 5 nodes suffices to reap most of the cooperative gains promised by a selective single-relay system.