Performance Analysis of an Amplify and Forward Relaying Scheme with Pre-Coding

Cooperative diversity can combat fading on multipath channels by exploiting space diversity available through cooperative relays. Half-duplex relaying is quite simple to implement but it is useful only when the direct link is weak. By allowing the source to transmit continuously, full-rate relay channels can be obtained. However, the performance of such a full-rate scheme is still limited by the direct link. In this paper¹ we consider pre-coding at the transmitter as a way of improving the performance of full-rate relay channels. The obtained results show that, with a proper selection of the pre-coding parameters, better system capacity can be obtained.