Bypassing Orthogonal Relaying Transmissions via Spatial Signal Separation

We argue for incorporating Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) into cooperative relaying, in order to bypass orthogonal relaying transmissions and thus achieve diversity gain without any cost on the available degrees of freedom. In particular, we propose a cooperative relaying scheme that utilizes two single-antenna relays and multiple antennas at the destination terminal, in order to spatially separate the concurrently arriving signals. The whole concept is based upon two key elements: a) To combat the half-duplex constraint by having two relays transmitting alternatively, i.e., the one receiving while the other transmitting and vice versa, and b) to spatially separate the signals arriving concurrently at the destination using the well-known optimum combining technique. Closed-form expressions for the average capacity and outage probability are provided. Numerical results manifest that the proposed model outperforms orthogonal relaying as well as distributed space-time coding in terms of average capacity and outage probability, owing to the former´s advantage of higher spectral efficiency.