Incremental relaying effect on the outage probability of correlated sources transmission

In this paper we investigate different relaying strategies for correlated source transmission in block Rayleigh fading channels. Outage probability close form expressions are derived for both the cases where incremental decode and forward and only simple decode and forward techniques are used in the relays. We show that when using incremental technique in the principal relay, not only we gain in terms of channel resource saving but we get also a significant outage performance improvement compared to simple decode and forward system. Another finding of this paper is that if incremental relaying technique is used in the principal relay, the system reaches a diversity order of 2 with a significant power gain compared to a two links maximum ratio combining system.