Relay ARQ strategies for single carrier MIMO broadband amplify-and-forward cooperative transmission

This paper investigates throughput-efficient relay ARQ protocols for single carrier MIMO systems with amplify-and-forward relaying. We focus on reducing the multiplexing loss due to the half-duplex operation at the relay. We introduce two new relaying protocols where both ARQ and relaying are jointly targeted. Compared to the conventional relaying techniques, the proposed mechanisms require only one time slot duration for transmitting the entire data packet at each ARQ round. We also focus on performance evaluation, and show that the new techniques provide significant improvement in average throughput while maintaining good outage probability performance.