Abstract:

In order to reduce the outage probability of cooperative communication, a hybrid forwarding scheme for cooperative communication system in symmetric wireless networks is proposed. In this scheme, each relay is decided to use either “amplify and forward (AF)” or “decode and forward (DF)” according to the instantaneous signal to noise ratio conditions between the source and the relay. Thus, the different relay nodes may use different communication protocols to carry out cooperative communication. An expression of the average outage probability on the hybrid forwarding scheme is derived. Furthermore, the simulation shows that the proposed hybrid forwarding scheme outperforms conventional cooperative relaying with AF and DF in reducing the outage probability.

Key words: cooperative communication, hybrid forwarding, outage probability