Two incremental relaying protocols for cooperative networks

The authors investigate a cooperative network with three terminals. By exploiting a simple two-bit feedback message from the destination, two incremental relaying protocols are proposed, namely incremental selection amplify-and-forward (ISAF) and joint incremental selection relaying (JISR) with an aim to balance the load between the source and the relay. The authors derive the asymptotic outage probabilities of the two new protocols and find them to be lower than that of the incremental amplify-and-forward (IAF) protocol, which has been identified as the best protocol so far. Moreover, the spectral efficiencies of ISAF and JISR match that of IAF. Simulation results have verified the asymptotic performance of the protocols and have shown that JISR outperforms ISAF and IAF over all signal-to-noise ratio values.