Relay on-off threshold for NDF protocol with distributed orthogonal space-time block codes

Abstract

In this article, a relay on-off threshold (ROT) based on symbol error rate is derived for the cooperative communication networks with multiple antennas, where the non-orthogonal decode-and-forward (NDF) protocol with source antenna switching and linear combining decoding are used as the relaying protocol and decoding scheme, respectively. The optimal ROT for the cases using distributed orthogonal space-time block codes is derived for high signal to noise ratio (SNR) region and also a suboptimal ROT is provided for low SNR region. Finally, the diversity order of the NDF protocol using the relay on-off scheme with the proposed ROT is derived and its performance is verified through numerical analysis.