Comparison of Low-Complexity Diversity Schemes for Dual-Hop AF Relaying Systems

This paper investigates the performance of two low-complexity combining schemes, which are based on one- or two-phase observation, to mitigate multipath fading in dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying systems. For the one-phase-based combining, a single-antenna station is assumed to relay information from a multiple-antenna transmitter to a multiple-antenna receiver, and the activation of the receive antennas is adaptively performed based on the second-hop statistics, regardless of the first-hop conditions. On the other hand, the two-phase-based combining suggests using multiple single-antenna stations between the multiple-antenna transmitter and the single-antenna receiver, where the suitable set of active relays is identified according to the precombining end-to-end fading conditions. To facilitate comparisons between the two schemes, formulations for the statistics of the combined signal-to-noise ratio and some performance measures are presented. Numerical and simulation results are shown to clarify the tradeoff between the achieved diversity-array gain, the processing complexity, and the power consumption.