WLC41-3: On the Performance of Cooperative Wireless Fixed Relays in Asymmetric Channels

In many scenarios the commonly assumed symmetry in multiple relay channels is unrealistic. Therefore, this paper, through analytical and simulation efforts, investigates asymmetric relay deployment where the links of cooperating nodes to destination experience unequal signal strength. An analysis of the cooperative error rate at the destination node in such networks is presented. Using the derived expressions for the cooperative error, in conjunction with the approaches used in earlier works, the end-to-end (E2E) performance of a two- hop network can be obtained. Moreover, the derived expression represents, in certain scenarios, a tight bound for the E2E error rate of the two-hop network such as when relay adopts threshold decode-and-forward strategy and/or multi-antenna processing to improve the reliability of its detection.