Adaptive channel coding for the three-node relay channel with limited channel-state information

We address the design of adaptive channel codes for the three-node relay channel. In order to make the code design feasible for wireless sensor-network (WSN) applications, we focus on the special case where only limited channel-state information is available for code adaptation. For this purpose we design distributed codes which feature a limited set of modes which are optimized to serve a certain range of channel conditions. As the results show, a good performance in terms of coverage and achievable rate is maintained compared to the case with perfect channel-state information. If the target application is spectrum sensing, the proposed scheme provides a feasible solution to improve the sensing performance and to reduce the latency due to its increased data rate compared to standard solutions.