An Improved Inter-Relay Cooperation Scheme for Distributed Relaying Networks

The authors consider a two-hop distributed relaying network using Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBC), where several relays using Decode-Forward (DF) support the transmission from one source to one destination. In order to mitigate the impact of error propagation for DF, an Inter-Relay Cooperation (IRC) scheme allowing message exchanges among the relays was presented in their previous work based on punctured channel codes. Specifically, one of the relays that decodes the source message correctly re-generates and broadcasts the punctured bits as side information to support the relays with decoding errors for re-decoding. Subsequently, only the error-free relays transmit to the destination using OSTBC.