Piecewise-and-Forward Relaying in Wireless Relay Networks

In this letter, we propose a piecewise-and-forward (PF) relaying protocol for wireless relay networks. In PF, the received signal at each relay is compared to an adaptive threshold. If the amplitude of the received signal is above the threshold, the relay will decode the signal, otherwise, the relay will forward the received signal after linear processing. An optimal maximum likelihood detector is developed at the destination for the proposed PF relaying protocol. Simulation results show that the PF protocol outperforms the existing amplify-and-forward, decode-and-forward and estimate-and-forward relaying protocols, and the gain increases as the number of relays increases.