914

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2009

Distributed Switch and Stay Combining for Selection Relay Networks

Vo Nguyen Quoc Bao and Hyung Yun Kong

AbstractWe propose an efcient combination of distributed switch and stay and selection relay that offers the best performance at high SNRs compared to conventional selection relay schemes and to incremental relaying schemes in conjunction with selection relay. Our results, in terms of bit error probability, conrm the benet of the proposed scheme at high SNR regime. We also show that the high-SNR performance of the proposed scheme with more than two relays is dominated by the decodeand-forward relaying link. Index TermsDecode-and-forward, incremental relaying, switch and stay combining, selection relay.

I. I NTRODUCTION T is well known that opportunistic relaying through the best relay is an attractive diversity technique for wireless networks in attaining broader coverage and in combating the impairment of the wireless channel [1], [2]. Although, these protocols can achieve full diversity, they lead to a certain loss in the channel resource because the best relay among available relays repeats all the time, making inefcient use of the degrees of freedom of the channels. To address this concern, in [3], [4], a distributed version of switch and stay combining (SSC) is proposed for one and two relays equipped with decode-and-forward (DF). Furthermore, its performance in terms of outage and error probability over Rayleigh fading channels has been investigated. However, to the best of the authors knowledge, there is no published work concerning the performance of distributed SSC in conjunction with selection relay schemes. Motivated by all of the above, in this paper, we investigate the performance of distributed switch and stay combining for selection relay networks (SSCSR) operating in the presence of slow at fading modeled by Rayleigh distributions. A closed-form expression for bit error probability (BEP) of the proposed scheme with an arbitrary number of relays is derived. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme provides the lowest BEP at high SNR regime compared to that of regular selection relay networks (SR) [2] and incremental relaying for selection relay networks (IRSR) assuming that no diversity combining is employed at the destination.

II. S YSTEM M ODEL We consider a wireless relay network consisting of one source (S), relays R with = 1, 2, , and one
Manuscript received July 10, 2009. The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for publication was G. Karagiannidis. The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Ulsan, San 29 of MuGeo Dong, Nam-Gu, Ulsan, 680-749 Korea (e-mail: {baovnq, hkong}@mail.ulsan.ac.kr). This work was supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) grant funded by the Korea government (MOST) (No. R01-2007000-20400-0). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LCOMM.2009.12.091440

destination (D) operating over Rayleigh fading channels. Each node is equipped with a single antenna and operates in halfduplex mode. All transmissions are assumed orthogonal either in time or in frequency. To facilitate the protocol description, we assume that a time division protocol is used. Let SD , SR and R D be the link coefcients between the source to the destination, the source to relay and relay to the destination, respectively. Due to Rayleigh fading, the channel powers, denoted by 0 = SD 2 , 1, = SR 2 and 2, = R D 2 , are independent and exponential random variables whose means are 0 , 1, and 2, , respectively. The average transmit power of the source and the relays is denoted by , then the instantaneous signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios for S D, S R and R D links are written as 0 = 0 , 1, = 1, and 2, = 2, , respectively. Different from the selection DF relay network in [2], the SSCSR network takes into account the direct link between the source and the destination by utilizing the concept of switch and stay combining. From the destination, the SSCSR network can be viewed as a virtual switch dual-diversity system where two input branches are the direct () and the relaying () link with their instantaneous SNRs are denoted by and , respectively. More specically, the source signal reaches the destination through either directly from the source or indirectly from the best relay (of the relaying link) where the best relay is chosen a priori according to the distributed timer fashion with minimum signaling overhead and minor additional complexity as shown in [1]. Whenever the relaying link is connected to the destination, the communication is divided into two subslots, i.e., the best relay fully decodes the signal sent from the source in the rst sub-slot, and then forwards the re-encoded version to the destination during the second sub-slot. In each transmission slot, only one branch is active. To determine the active branch, the destination compares the received SNR (which equals to or depending on which branch was the active branch on the previous time slot) with the given threshold, . The switching occurs when the instantaneous SNR of the currently selected link falls below the threshold regardless the current instantaneous SNR of the alternative link. The switching process becomes effective during the following transmission slot by utilizing a limited feedback sent to the source and all relays. The fading is further assumed to be slow enough that the fading envelope of each signal is constant over two consecutive transmission slots. III. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS Assuming that the relaying link is being used, i.e., = where denotes the active branch. Owing to selection relaying, the best relay providing highest instantaneous SNR composed of the SNRs across the two hops is selected to

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BAO and KONG: DISTRIBUTED SWITCH AND STAY COMBINING FOR SELECTION RELAY NETWORKS

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forward the source information to the destination. Since uncoded modulation is used, the relays equipped with xed DF cannot detect any erroneous detection, it may forward incorrectly decoded signals to the destination. Hence, similarly as in [2], the instantaneous dual-hop SNR of the best relay at the destination can be tightly approximated in the high SNR regime as follows: = max=1,..., (1) = { } = [( 1, )1 + where = min{1, ; 2, } with 1 1 ( 2, ) ] , {.} denotes the statistical expectation. Assuming the independence among the channels, the joint probability density function (PDF) of is given by [2, eq. (4)] ( ) =
=1

fading channel for -ary square quadrature amplitude ( QAM) modulation ( = 4 , = 1, 2, . . .) with Gray mapping can be expressed under the general form as [5] Pr {(( = , > )} ) log 2 ( ) = erfc ( >) ( )
0 =1 =0

(8)
1 where = (12 ) 1, = (1).2 / (2 1 = (2 + .2 1 / + 1/2 )/( log2 ), 2 1) 3 log2 /(2 2). Furthermore, we dene . and erfc(.) as the oor and complementary error function, respectively. Substituting (7) into (8) (with considering = ) and then taking the integral with respect to , we achieve the conditional average BEP of the S D link as follows: log2 =1 =0

(1)

1 ,..., =1 1 <<

(2)

1 where = . From (2), the corresponding cumula=1 tive distribution function (CDF) of is written as ( ) 1 1 (1) ( ) = ( ) =
0 =1 1 ,..., =1 1 <<

Pr {( = , > )} =

( 0 , ) (9) , ,

where (.) is dened as follows [3, eq. (8)]:

(, , , ) = erfc( ) 1 [ ( )] erfc (1 + ) = erfc( ) 1+

(3)

In a at Rayleigh fading channel, the PDF and CDF of can be expressed as ( ) =

1 0 0 ; ( ) = 1 0

(10)

(4)

where 0 = {0 } = 0 . A. Distributed Switch and Stay Combining for Selection Relay To characterize the performance of SSCSR networks, according to the operation mode of switch and stay combiner, we must rst determine the steady state selection probability for each branch dened as the percentage of time that branch will serve as an active branch. Mathematically speaking, we have = Pr( = ) = ( )/[ ( ) + ( )] = Pr( = ) = ( )/[ ( ) + ( )] (5a) (5b)

Next, we consider the conditional average BEP for the relaying link. Similarly, from (2), (3) and (7), Pr {( = , > )} can be derived as Pr {( = , > )}
log 2 =1 =0 =1

(1)1

1 ,..., =1 1 << 1 ( )

1 ( , , , )

(11)

It is of interest to study the asymptotic performance of SSCSR schemes at high SNR regime. In particular, since the average SNR approaches innity and more than one relay is involved in the cooperative transmission, i.e., > 1, we observe that

(12) Pr( ) Pr( > ) Pr {( = , > )} where ( ) can be readily obtained by evaluating ( ) log2 at = with {, }. The end-to-end BEP for SSCSR 1 1 = (1) ( schemes can be derived by using the law of total probability , , , ) 1 ,..., =1 =1 =0 =1 as 1 << ] [ Pr( ) Pr {( = )} + Pr( ) = (6) Technically, (12) is followed immediately from (6) by Pr( > ) Pr {( = , > )} ] making use the fact that at high SNRs and for > 1, [ Pr( ) Pr {( = )} + + Pr( ) 0 and ( ) ( ) results in Pr( > ) Pr {( = , > )} = 1 1. where Pr( ) = 1 Pr( > ) = ( ). By Based on the steady state selection probabilities, the achievintroducing {, 0}, the conditional PDF of ( > ) able spectral efciency of the proposed scheme can be excan be obtained by using conditional probability as follows: pressed as { 0 , = + /2 ( >) ( ) = (7) (13) ( )/[1 ( )] , > Recalling that Pr {( = )} = Pr {( = , > 0)}, the conditional average BEP of the S D link over Rayleigh where denotes the average spectral efciency of direct transmission.

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IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2009

10

10

10 Bit Error Probability

10

10

SR N=1 Analysis [2, eq. (8)] SR N=1 Simulation SSCSR N=1 Analysis SSCSR N=1 Simulation IRSR N=1 Analysis IRSR N=1 Simulation SR N=3 Analysis [2, eq. (8)] SR N=3 Simulation SSCSR N=3 Analysis SSCSR N=3 Simulation IRSR N=3 Analysis IRSR N=3 Simulation SSCSR Approx. (eq.12) IRSR Approx. (eq.15)

Spectral Efficiency

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0 5 10 15 20 25 Average SNR [dB] 30

Direct Transmission Selection Relay [2] IRSR SSCSR N=1 SSCSR N=3

35

40

Fig. 2.

Achievable spectral efciency ( = 5, = 1).

10

10

10

10

10

15

20 25 Average SNR [dB]

30

35

40

Fig. 1. BEP for SR, SSCSR and IRSR schemes ( = 5, 0 = 1, {1, } =1 = 2, and {2, }=1 = 3).

B. Incremental Relaying for Selection Relay Same as the incremental protocol with one relay [3], the BEP of IRSR schemes without employing diversity combining can be written as Pr( ) = Pr( ) Pr {( = )} (14) + Pr( > ) Pr {( = , > )} Since the switching threshold is very small in comparison with the average SNR, the rst term in (14) vanishes due to 0 ) 0 leading to the fact that Pr( ) = 1 exp( / the approximation form of (14) at high SNRs as follows:
log2

Pr( )

( 0 , ) , , =1 =0

(15)

Intuitively, the IRSR protocol offers an average spectral efciency, which is less than but larger than /2. In particular, the expected spectral efciency for IRSR can be obtained as = Pr( )/2+Pr( > ) = /2[1+exp( / 0 )] (16) IV. N UMERICAL RESULTS AND C ONCLUSION In this section, numerical results are presented to verify the analytical results derived above where the number of possible relays in the network investigated is 1 and 3. In Fig. 1, the performance comparison of three these schemes (SR1 , SSCSR and IRSR) is performed. For a fair comparison in terms of spectral efciency, in SSCSR and IRSR schemes, 4-QAM and 16-QAM are used for the direct and the relaying link, respectively. Furthermore, the BEP of SR with 16-QAM is plotted as a reference. We can see that these schemes with = 3 behave quite differently at low and high SNR regimes. Specically, at low SNRs, i.e., SNR 18dB, among them, SR gives the most inferior performance, IRSR gives the best performance and SSCSR has a performance quality in between the others. However, at high SNRs, it is apparent that IRRS results in the worst performance, followed by SR. Note that with = 1, the
1 In

performance of IRSR and SSCSR is almost the same at low SNRs. Furthermore, the approximations obtained from (12) and (15) are plotted to compare with the closed-form BEP expressions obtained from (6) and (14) for SSCSR and IRSR, respectively. The observation clearly indicates that the approximations provide a good indication of the asymptotic performance for SSCSR and IRSR systems at high SNRs. We further observe from the curves of Fig. 1 that the performance of SR and SSCSR always improves monotonically with increasing at high SNR regime. By contrast, the curves relative to IRSR is totally bounded by the limit determined by the quality of the rst time slot communication. This behavior can be explained by the following arguments. For high SNRs, the IRRS rarely requests the help from the best relay and therefore the end-to-end BEP is dominated by the direct S D communication. On the other hand, for channels with low SNRs, the communication in the rst time slot signal is not sufcient for errorless transmission and therefore leading to the high demand of relaying transmission. The advantage of SSCSR schemes can be further ascertained by referring to Fig. 2 where the spectral efciency of three systems is shown. Compared with SR schemes, the advantage of IRSR and SSCSR schemes is the improvement of spectral efciency with the cost of a limited feedback from the destination. At high SNR values, the spectral efciency of SSCSR with 3 relays reaches to that of SR and its performance is better than that of SR. This point can be explained by using the fact that contrary to SR schemes, in SSCSR schemes, the direct link between the source and the destination is taken into account and the destination is almost locked to the relaying link at high SNRs. In conclusion, in this paper, the concept of distributed SSC with selection relay schemes has been presented. The analysis is applicable for general cases, including independent identically distributed and independent but not identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results are in excellent agreement with the analysis. R EFERENCES
[1] A. Bletsas, H. Shin, and M. Z. Win, Cooperative communications with outage-optimal opportunistic relaying, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 6, no. 9, pp. 3450-3460, Sep. 2007. [2] T. Q. Duong and V. N. Q. Bao, Performance analysis of selection decode-and-forward relay networks, Electron. Lett., vol. 44, pp. 12061207, 2008. [3] D. S. Michalopoulos and G. K. Karagiannidis, Distributed switch and stay combining (DSSC) with a single decode and forward relay, IEEE Commun. Lett., vol. 11, pp. 408-410, Nov. 2007. [4] D. S. Michalopoulos and G. K. Karagiannidis, Two-relay distributed switch and stay combining, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 56, no. 11, pp. 1790-1794, Nov. 2008. [5] K. Cho and D. Yoon, On the general BER expression of one- and two-dimensional amplitude modulations, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 50, no. 7, pp. 1074-1080, July 2002.

this paper, SR is used to refer to selection DF relay networks in [2].

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