Exact and Approximated Outage Probability Analyses for Decode-and-Forward Relaying System Allowing Intra-Link Errors

In this paper, we theoretically analyze the outage probability of decode-and-forward (DF) relaying system allowing intra-link errors (DF-IE), where the relay always forwards the decoder output to the destination regardless of whether errors are detected after decoding in the information part or not. The results apply to practical fading scenarios where all the links between the nodes suffer from independent block Rayleigh fading. The key idea of DF-IE system is that the data sequence forwarded by the relay is highly correlated with the original information sequence sent from the source, and hence with a proper joint decoding technique at the destination, the correlation knowledge can well be exploited to improve the system performance. We analyze this problem in the information theoretical framework of correlated source coding. Using the theorems for lossy source-channel separation and for source coding with side information, the exact outage probability is derived. It is then shown that the exact expression can be reduced to a simple, yet accurate approximation by replacing the theorem for source coding with side information by the Slepian-Wolf theorem. Compared with conventional DF relaying where relay keeps silent if errors are detected after decoding, DF-IE can achieve even lower outage probability. Moreover, by allowing intra-link errors, the optimal position of the relay is found to be exactly the midpoint between the source and destination. Results of the simulations are provided to verify the accuracy of the analytical results.