Compressed-and-forward: Compressive sensing for cooperative communication

Cooperative communication has been shown that it is an effective way to achieve spatial diversity in order to combat the user-outage caused by effects fading channel. Except for amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF), compressed-and-forward (CF) is also an efficient forwarding strategy. In the existing CF protocol, the relay will switch to the DF mode when the source transmitted signal can be recovered by the relay completely; however, no further compression is made in this scheme. This paper proposes a new CF scheme. The relay will estimate if the codeword in a predefined block can be succeeded decoded, then choose the corresponding forwarding methods which are based on joint source-channel coding or compressive sensing. At the decode side, a joint decoder is designed to decode the source according to the relay compression mode. Simulation results show that the proposed CF scheme can acquire the spatial diversity and outperform AF and DF schemes.