A Case for Amplify-Forward Relaying in the Block-Fading Multi-Access Channel

This paper demonstrates the significant gains that multi-access users can achieve from sharing a single amplify-forward relay in slow fading environments. The proposed protocol, namely multi-access amplify-forward, allows for a low-complexity relay and achieves the optimal diversity-multiplexing trade-off at high multiplexing gains. Analysis of the protocol further reveals that it outperforms both the compress-forward strategy at low multiplexing gains and the dynamic decode-forward protocol at high multiplexing gains. An interesting feature of the proposed protocol is that, at high multiplexing gains, it resembles a multiple-input single-output system, and at low multiplexing gains, it provides each user with the same diversity-multiplexing trade-off as if there is no contention for the relay from the other users.