On the Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff of Amplify-and-Forward Half-Duplex Relaying

In this paper, an amplify-and-forward (AF) two-path half-duplex relaying scheme is considered in which one of the relays additionally performs inter-relay interference cancellation. We first generalize lower bounds for the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of an arbitrary block lower triangular channel matrix. We then characterize the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for the AF two-path relaying scheme and show that the DMT achieves the multiple-input single-output (MISO) upper bound. The analysis also demonstrates that, with a careful choice of the coding strategy, the DMT of this scheme is achievable for finite codeword lengths. We then propose using an equivalent linear space time code at the source, which does not require any form of channel state information, as a simple and effective coding strategy to achieve the full DMT of the scheme. From the DMT perspective, the proposed AF two-path relaying with the equivalent linear space time coding outperforms existing schemes. Our analysis is then extended to the slotted-amplify-and-forward (SAF) scheme with multiple relays, where we provide a stronger result by deriving the DMT while taking into account inter-relay interference.