Interference-aware dual-hop cooperative relaying in a poisson field of interferers

In this paper, we study amplify-and-forward dual-hop cooperative relaying protocols in the presence of Rayleigh fading, additive noise at the relay, as well as additive noise and symmetric alpha-stable interference at the destination. A quasi-static interference scenario is considered, which arises, e.g., when the same interferers are active during broadcast and relaying phases. At the destination, a maximal ratio combining demodulator is developed and studied, by assuming that the aggregate interference can be estimated, i.e., interference-aware design. A closed-form expression of the end-to-end moment generating function is provided and the achievable diversity order is studied. Two main results emerge from the paper: 1) if the ratio of the transmit-powers of cooperative and interfering networks is a constant, the diversity order is equal to 1 and 2) if the transmit-power of the interfering network is a constant, the diversity order is equal to 1 + 1/b_I, where b_I > 1 is the amplitude path-loss exponent. In the latter case, thus, second-order diversity is achieved asymptotically, as the amplitude path-loss exponent tends to one. Mathematical frameworks and findings are validated with the aid of Monte Carlo simulations.