Approaching MISO upper bound: Design of new wireless cooperative transmission protocols

While various cooperative protocols have been developed for the simple scenario with one source-destination pair, most of them still suffer a significant loss compared with the optimal multiple-input single-output (MISO) upper bound. The diversity-multiplexing tradeoff will be used as the criterion for performance evaluation. In this paper, we propose two new half-duplex decode-forward cooperative transmission protocols, whose performance can approach the optimal MISO bound, and achieve a better diversity-multiplexing tradeoff when compared with existing cooperative protocols, particularly for large multiplexing gains. Firstly, a simple protocol of cooperative transmission is devised by combining opportunistic strategies with non-orthogonal transmission. When the number of relays is large, the proposed opportunistic decode-forward cooperative protocol can approach the optimal MISO upper bound. Due to the inter-relay interference constraint, each relay can only be used once, which limits the achievable diversity gain. Such an observation motivates our second transmission protocol which can further push the performance of cooperative transmission close to the optimal upper bound. Secondly, a relaying protocol is proposed for a four-node network where two multiple-antenna relays alternately forward messages to the destination when they can successfully cancel the inter-relay interference using the zero forcing method. Monte-Carlo simulation has also been provided to demonstrate the performance of both protocols and comparable ones.