Low-Complexity Combining Schemes in Dual-Hop AF Relaying Systems

This paper investigates the performance of different low-complexity combining schemes in the context of dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying networks. It is assumed that the relay uses single transmit (receive) antenna due to space limitation and to reduce the processing complexity. On the other hand, the transmitter and the receiver use antenna arrays to improve the overall diversity gain. However, this gain is achieved at the expense of increased processing complexity and power consumption. To this end, some combining schemes aiming at reducing the processing complexity and decreasing the number of active receive channels are investigated. Through the analysis, new formulas for the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio statistics in slowly varying and frequency flat Rayleigh fading channels are derived, which are then used to present some performance measures. Numerical and simulation results are presented to clarify the trade-off between the achieved diversity gain and the receive processing complexity.