Application of LLR on Cooperative Communications for Wireless Relay Networks

Decode-and-forward cooperative communications protocol (DFP) allows single-antenna users in wireless medium to obtain the powerful benefits of multi-antenna systems without physical antenna arrays. For this protocol, so far the relays have used SNR to evaluate the reliability of the received signal before deciding whether to forward the decoded data so as to prevent their unsuccessful detection. However, SNR only characterizes the long-term statistic of Gaussian noise and thus leading to inaccurate assesment. Therefore, we propose using log-likelihood ratio (LLR) which accounts for the instantaneous noise in the received signal as an alternative to SNR. A variety of simulation results reveal the significant superiority of the SNR-based DFP to the SNR-based DFP regardless of threshold level and relay position under the flat Rayleigh fading channel plus AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise).