A Low-Complexity Practical Quantize-and-Forward Scheme for Two-Hop Relay Systems

We study a low-complexity practical quantize-and-forward (QF) scheme, a special case of the compress-and-forward (CF) transmission for half-duplex relay systems. By adjusting the number of quantization levels, we show that significant performance improvement can be achieved even though the relay node does not exploit any correlation information with the signal received at the destination. We demonstrate the performance of our scheme using 16QAM as the modulation and Turbo Code as the channel coding, and compare its performance against the decode-and-forward (DF) scheme. An approximately 2 dB gain is shown to be achievable at a target error rate of 10^-4 in the scenario where the relay is close to destination.