Joint switched selection-combining diversity and incremental Amplify-and-Forward relaying over Rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, an adaptive diversity-combining technique and Amplify-and-Forward (AF) dual-hop incremental relaying are jointly used to enhance the reliability of wireless data links. The proposed scheme exploits the efficient use of the bandwidth by adopting incremental relaying (IR) and the reduction of the processing power by using a switched diversity-combining (SDC) technique. For theoretical analysis, a three-nodes-network is considered: single antenna source and relay, and a multiple antenna destination. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme, assuming Rayleigh fading channel models, is shown by simulation results. The obtained results illustrate that the proposed scheme offers the desired bit error rate (BER) requirements while reducing considerably the average receiver channel estimations as well as the processing power.