Adaptive Modulation for Opportunistic Decode-and-Forward Relaying

Orthogonal relay based cooperative communication enjoys distributed spatial diversity gain at the price of spectral efficiency. This work aims at improving the spectral efficiency for orthogonal opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF) relaying through employment of novel adaptive modulation scheme. The proposed scheme allows source and relay to transmit information in different modulation formats, while the MAP receiver is employed at destination for the diversity combining. Given the individual power constraint and target bit-error-rate (BER), the proposed scheme can significantly improve the spectral efficiency in comparison with the non-adaptive DF relaying and adaptive direct transmission.