Novel hybrid relay and code selection protocol

In this paper, a novel hybrid relay selection and coding protocol for cooperative communication is proposed. The proposed protocol prevents the reaching to an error floor with minimal sacrificing from the full diversity for any number of mobile relays. In the new protocol, the relays transmit their source-relay channel information to the destination with one bit and the destination informs the source and the relays about the selected balanced code and the selected relays with few bits of feedback. As a benchmark for comparison we consider distributed space time block codes (DSTBC). Unfortunately, DSTBC perform poorly when source-relay channels have low SNR, an error floor is reached. Detailed computer simulations show that, in our proposed protocol, the occurrence of the error floor shifts considerably to higher SNR values.