Energy efficiency in selective decode and forward cooperative communication

Cooperative communication systems that exploit spatial diversity to improve the performance of end-to-end communication in ad hoc wireless networks have gained a lot of attention in recent years. In this article, we examine the energy efficiency of a simple selective decode and forward (SDF) protocol. Different from previous studies on energy efficiency our analysis accounts for the imperfect regeneration at the relay. We show that the cooperative system using the SDF protocol can achieve higher energy efficiency than a single-input-single-output (SISO) transmission when the transmit-power consumed by the power amplifiers become higher than the total power consumed by the analog circuitry at the nodes.