Optimum Combining for Cooperative Relaying in a Poisson Field of Interferers

Spatial point processes are commonly used to model the placement and the number of interferers in modern wireless networks, where the ad hoc deployment of transmitters is common. The homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP) is the most popular spatial point process used to model co-channel interference. Optimum combining (OC) is the diversity combining technique that maximizes the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio at the receiver. The performance of OC in cooperative relaying in an interferer field modeled by a homogeneous PPP is analyzed. Both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relay protocols are studied. Multirelay transmission and relay selection techniques are considered. Accurate approximations for the outage probability are derived for DF and AF relaying when the destination is able to estimate the noise-plus-interference correlation matrix (NICM) perfectly. An approximation for the outage probability of DF relaying is obtained when the destination only estimates the channel state information of the closest interferer. Relay selection outperforms multirelay transmission in both DF and AF relaying protocols. The interference correlation at the relays significantly degrades the outage performance. Limited estimation of the NICM results in better performance than conventional maximal-ratio combining, although it fails to achieve diversity gains.