Designing Peak Power Constrained Amplify-and-Forward Relay Networks with Cooperative Diversity

Relay networks with amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol have attracted attention due to its high performance and low implementation complexity at the relay. To collect full cooperative diversity, the AF relay networks are facing two main issues. One is that the channel state information (CSI) of the source to relay link (i.e., two-hop information) is needed at the destination. The other concern is that the power scaling factor (PSF) and output signals at the relay are unbounded. These two issues make AF less practical in resource constrained networks, e.g., blind and peak power constrained relays. In this paper, we reveal the sufficient and necessary conditions on the PSF for the maximum ratio combining (MRC) receiver with two-hop CSI to achieve full cooperative diversity. Furthermore, we also provide necessary conditions on the PSF design so that MRC with one-hop CSI still collects full cooperative diversity. Based on these design criteria, we show a practical peak power constrained AF strategy so that neither the relay nor the destination node needs the source-relay CSI, yet full cooperative diversity can still be achieved.