Analysis of packet combining for single carrier multi-relay broadband system

This paper focuses on packet combining for multi-relay systems operating over multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) broadband channel. The work presented in this paper is valid for both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying schemes. First, we drive a communication model in such a way that the destination can see the received signals during the relaying slots as direct retransmissions from the source. We then present a multi-slot communication model where transmission over relaying slots is translated into virtual receive antennas and examine the outage probability of different relaying schemes. Using simulations, we show that this schemes outperform each other depending on the relays location and demonstrate that the multi-relay transmissions provide better diversity gain than the conventional hybrid-Automatic repeat request (ARQ).