Energy-efficient antenna sharing and relaying for wireless networks

We develop energy-efficient transmission protocols for wireless networks that exploit spatial diversity created by antenna sharing: coordinated transmission and/or processing by several distributed radios. We focus on single-user transmission and examine several possibilities for the strategy employed by the assisting radio, or relay, including decoding and forwarding as well as amplifying and forwarding. In each case, we develop receivers based upon maximum-likelihood and/or maximum signal-to-noise ratio criteria, relate their structures, and compare their bit-error probability performance by means of analysis and simulations. We cast single-hop and multihop routing into our framework for comparison purposes. All of our antenna sharing protocols offer diversity gains over single-hop and multihop transmission, and our results suggest that low-complexity amplifying and forwarding is energy-efficient in spite of noise amplification at the relay