Selective cooperative relaying system with polarization diversity

This paper studies performance of two-hop cooperative relaying system, employing infrastructure based fixed relays having dual-polarized receive antenna. Relay performs maximal ratio combining of the received signals, and then selectively forwards the received signal towards the destination. If the received signal can be decoded correctly, it will be retransmitted to the destination in the next time slot. Otherwise, relay stays idle, and source transmits signal through the direct link only. In order to determine the level of performance improvements introduced through the implementation of polarization diversity, performances of the considered system are compared with the relay system with single antenna relay. The obtained results show that, using polarization diversity, the same BER (Bit Error Rate) values can be obtained with significantly lower SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), despite a certain level of correlation and power unbalance between the diversity branches.